Importance of Philosophical History.

 

The following from a Gilson Reader illustrates quite well I think the point I was trying to make to my brother which is: “ a philosophy or philosopher can only be understood in the context of the history of philosophy.”

 By  turning the concrete into a mosaic of clear ideas, the mathematical method of Descartes raised difficulties whose solution was sought throughout the whole of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the nineteenth century it led in the end to despair—despair of philosophy itself.

How can the domain of pure thought ever be in touch with the domain of pure extension when the property of substances is to be mutually exclusive? This is what Descartes does not tell us. He allows us a thought (not a soul), and extension (not a body): he is unable to account for the union of soul and body.

 

. . . The occasionalism of Malebranche, the pre-established harmony of Leibniz, the parallelism of Spinoza are so many metaphysical “epicycles to solve an ill-stated problem by rescuing, with the aid of complementary devices, the very principle which make the problem insoluble.

 

Again:

What is the most striking difference between the Greek notion of the deity and the notion of God common to practically all the seventeenth-century philosophers? The best answer we can imagine is that, apart from Anaximander, who in a rather cryptic statement said that “the first principle of all things is infinite,” no known Greek philosopher ever posited an infinite being as the cause of all that which is, whereas Descartes, Leibniz, Malebranche, and practically all the other metaphysicians of the seventeenth century conceived of God as the primary cause of all that which is, and they did so on the strength of he principle hat, if there is a God, He must needs be an infinite being. The remark applies even to the only one among these philosophers who was not a Christian, namely Spinoza. God, Spinoza says, ”is a being absolutely indefinite, that is a substance consisting of infinite attributes, each of which expresses eternal and infinite essence.” What can be the cause for this radical change in perspective? The only answer we can imagine is that this cause is to be found in the theological speculation which starting from the biblical notion of a

Creator of all beings, led the men of the middle ages to conceive infinity as a positive conception of being.

 

Again:

. . . Even Spinoza cannot be fully accounted for without taking into account the speculation of the middle ages. To overlook what happened to philosophy in the thirteenth century is to deprive the history of Wetsern thought of its continuity and, by the same token, its intelligibility.