Auguste Rodin, The thinker.

The word philosophy comes from the Greek words filein (to love) and sophia (wisdom).
Philosophy studies and defines the limits and possibilities of knowledge and existence of man, considered as single and as being related to others. Therefore there is a theoretical side and a practical one. The latter was a main subject especially in ancient Greece where the political aspect of the polis was very decisive. In ancient Greece the philosopher was a politician, an astronomer, a wise man tout court.

Amazement, astonishment and wonder brought about philosophy in Greece. Greek philosophy came about when man realized the world is beautiful, and then felt the necessity to describe and understand it. Through philosophy, man felt part of the world more deeply.
Ethimology brought us to Greece, however, before mentioning the development of philosophy in Greece, it is better to focus on the real origins of philosophy, in order to understand where and when it really developed.
Even though it is difficult to assert where and when philosophy was born, we can say that around 1000 B.C. a way of thinking which is something between philosophy and religion rose in India. The sacred texts of Indian Veda are probably the most ancient philosophical texts (1300 a.c.)

While Greece and Rome were still in their prehistoric period, in the far east, especially India and China, one of the deepest philosophical-religious experiences of humanity, took place: Hinduism, Taoism and Buddhism, which are still alive today, as three eternal pillars of human philosophical and spiritual background.
Oriental philosophies conceive knowledge in terms of salvation and/or enlightenment. Man has to move on from samsara to nirvana, which is a very challenging shift of existence, from an illusionary world to a real one. Once man, has done this decisive passage, which, according to the Indian Tradition is unveiling the veil of maya, the veil of illusion above the real world, man becomes a philosopher, a saint, illuminated. Gautama Buddha, in VI sec. B.C. in India, was the first person to be illuminated, the one who gave the example to follow, from which comes Buddhism itself.
At around the same time, in China, Lao Tzu created the doctrine of Tao, the foundation of everything that explains the becoming of things, symbolized in the two opposite principles ying and yang.

Conversely, in the VI sec. B.C. in Mileto, the main city of Ionia, the most important economic and cultural site of the ancient western world at that time, a more laic philosophy was born. It was concerned to the world of senses and to what in the future will be called science. In fact we can certainly say that science cams from the Mileto school of philosophers, because these thinkers were the first who tried to explain the world basing upon nature and its laws. In their Weltanschauungeen there are no supernatural or transcendent principles but only natural ones, such as water for Thales, air for Anaximenes and fire for Heraclitus. Their main purpose was finding the eternal principle of everything, the so called arché. The most important fact about their philosophies was that these principles are something they found in nature, rather than in the noetic world of concepts.

Greek thinking marks the first definite separation of philosophy from religion, the first position of autonomy by reason. Even though these first philosophies inherit many elements from myth, which is still a way of comprehension with a quite weak and even absent presence of reason.
Only with the advent of Christianity  philosophy begins to focus on religion, but still in a scientific way and with its logical tools: theology rises. All this period, the Middle Ages, is a justification of the Christian doctrine by philosophy, all medieval philosophers try to demonstrate the existence of God with the help of reason, each one in his own way and with a personal demonstration. For example the famous Anselm’s ontological argument.

With the coming of the modern era, science begins to progress and the more it progresses the more Christianity loses its supremacy. Its positions are by now discredited by  new science: Galileo discovered the position and the movement of the earth around the sun causing quite a strong cultural revolution of that time, so strong that he was accused of being a heretic by the Church. To avoid death he had to reject his theories in the process (even though shortly after it, his famous words: “eppur si muove!”, underline his certanity about the truth he exposed, a truth then confirmed by future science).

Another thinker, who was close to this ideas, was burned alive after seven years of imprisonment: that was the tragic destiny of the great philosopher Giordano Bruno.
The philosopher Cesare Vanini was burned too and Girolamo Savonarola was tortured, stoned, hanged and finally burned as a result of his way of thinking.
This is the Renaissance: the revival of reason, autonomy of philosophy and science and the eternal struggle against religion, that always repressed their work and cancelled their lives.After the Renaissance, philosophy became more and more rational. In fact in his Critique of pure reason, Kant asks: what the limits of knowledge are? Can we go beyond reason? And what about metaphysics?

All these questions and many other along with the crucial distinction between phenomenon and noumenon, mark a deep step on the history of philosophy and its development. After this apex of logic and extreme effort of human reason, idealism arrives: a revival of spiritual thought enriched with a strong background of modern empiricist philosophy. Kant’s noumenon would be studied in the deepest way by German idealists such as Fichte, Schelling and Hegel.Afterwords, existenzialism and nihilism “killed” all romantic and idealistic élans of philosophy, bringing it to its contemporary and quite tragic level. Postmodernism is the name that unites all those philosophies that describes this present spleen.

While French and German thought dominated the continental panorama of western modern and contemporary philosophy, in the Anglo-American world philosophers dedicated to other ways of thinking: the analytical philosophy. A way of thinking which  revolves around logic, nature and limits of science (epistemology) and nature and limits of words (philosophy of language). In conclusion analytical philosophy is above all, a discipline that studies science in its intellectual aspect. So, it is clear how far we have came since the spiritual oriental beginning…

Nevertheless new contemporary thought bring together modern discovery of science, above all quantum physics, and oriental wisdom, on this point, I can’t not mention the Capra’s book The Tao of Physics, which well describes this new (age) thought.

In conclusion it is quite obvious that these new contemporary “philosophies” are pretty close to Heraclitus doctrine of contraries, the Chinese Ying and Yang or the Indian veil of maya.

Perhaps, mentioning Nietzsche,  we can talk about an ancient-contemporary eternal return.

Lucio Giuliodori.