History of Western Philosophy

Democritus was a thorough-going materialist; for him, as we have seen, the soul was composed of atoms, and thought was a physical process.

To come to a more general matter: Aristotelian physics is incompatible with Newton’s “First Law of Motion,” originally enunciated by Galileo. This law states that every body, left to itself, will, if already in motion, continue to move in a straight line with uniform velocity. Thus outside causes are required, not to account for motion, but to acco

With subjectivism in philosophy, anarchism in politics goes hand in hand. Already during Luther’s lifetime, unwelcome and unacknowledged disciples had developed the doctrine of Anabaptism, which, for a time, dominated the city of Münster. The Anabaptists repudiated all law, since they held that the good man will be guided at every moment by the Hol

Pythagoras, as everyone knows, said that “all things are numbers.” This statement, interpreted in a modern way, is logically nonsense, but what he meant was not exactly nonsense. He discovered the importance of numbers in music, and the connection which he established between music and arithmetic survives in the mathematical terms “ harmonic mean”

Locke, as we saw, believed pleasure to be the good, and this was the prevalent view among empiricists throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Their opponents, on the contrary, despised pleasure as ignoble, and had various systems of ethics which seemed more exalted. Hobbes valued power, and Spinoza, up to a point, agreed with Hobbes.

This Pythagorean theory is attributed to Philolaus, a Theban, who lived at the end of the fifth century B.C. Although it is fanciful and in part quite unscientific, it is very important, since it involves the greater part of the imaginative effort required for conceiving the Copernican hypothesis. To conceive of the earth, not as the centre of the

Book One ANCIENT PHILOSOPHY

Galileo, as every one knows, was condemned by the Inquisition, first privately in 1616, and then publicly in 1633, on which latter occasion he recanted, and promised never again to maintain that the earth rotates or revolves.

It is evident from the above that what makes the ascetic dislike sex is its independence of the will. Virtue, it is held, demands a complete control of the will over the body, but such control does not suffice to make the sexual act possible. The sexual act, therefore, seems inconsistent with a perfectly virtuous life.