Western philosophical thought and its significance

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The following is an essay on the history of the development of Western philosophy:

The Three Turns in the Development of Western Philosophy

[Abstract] The object of philosophical study consists of three different aspects, namely, the external world, the self, the medium between the self and the external world, and between the self and others. between and between the self and others as mediators. From this insight, it is argued that there have been three great turns in the history of Western philosophy. The first one is from solipsistic philosophy to critical philosophy; the second one is from critical philosophy to existential philosophy; and the third one is from existential philosophy to contemporary philosophy of language

[Keywords] Solipsism, Critical Philosophy, Existential Philosophy, Contemporary Philosophy of Language

[Author's Introduction] YU Wujin (1948-), male, Xiaoshan, Zhejiang Province, is a member of Fudan University. Xiaoshan, director of the Center for the Study of Contemporary Foreign Marxism, Fudan University, professor and doctoral supervisor, mainly engaged in the study of foreign philosophy and foreign Marxism.

In the study of the history of Western philosophy, people are often eager to talk about the "internal logic of the development of the history of Western philosophy". It is often the result of the researcher's "hardening" of his subjective research experience, and this "hardening" is often unsuccessful. It is true that in the actual research activities, no researcher can completely get rid of his or her own perspective to observe and analyze the history of philosophy, but the following possibility still exists, that is, the researcher, through the in-depth reflection on his or her own pre-understanding of the structure and the critical examination of the historical materials of philosophy, can make his or her own subjective research insights more in line with the real process of the evolution of the history of Western philosophy. This paper is a crystallization of this attempt.

This paper argues that the history of Western philosophy is the result of a continuum of Western philosophers in different historical periods thinking about the same philosophical issues of concern to ****. Regardless of how philosophers' understanding of philosophical problems led to very different conclusions, the object of their thinking was **** the same. This object contains three different sides: the first side is the external world faced by the individual and the relations between things in the external world; the second side is the self as the object of the individual's reflection and the relations between the self and the other; and the third side is the medium for communicating the relations between the individual and the external world as well as the relations between the individual and the other, of which language and the syntax, semantics, pragmatics, and pragmatics embedded in it are of particular importance. grammatical, semantic, pragmatic and logical issues.

When we reflect on the history of Western philosophy closely centered on these three sides that no philosophical inquiry can avoid, we will find that the inner logic of the development of the history of Western philosophy is emerging in an objective way. We might as well understand this internal logic as the following three major turns:

The first major turn: from solipsistic philosophy to critical philosophy

From the history of the development of Western philosophy, the first major turn, i.e., from solipsistic philosophy to critical philosophy, was accomplished through a long process from ancient Greek philosophy to Kantian philosophy. In general terms, all pre-Kantian philosophy can be categorized as solipsistic philosophy.

What is solipsism? Hegel writes: "The antithesis of solipsism is skepticism. The ancient theorists called solipsism for any philosophy that holds a certain doctrine as long as it holds a certain doctrine." Indeed, the ancient scholar Sektus . Empirico also states in the Outline of Pyrrhonism, "Those who think that they have discovered the truth,...are properly called solipsists." That is to say, all the ancient philosophers who have drawn affirmative conclusions from their own research can be called "solipsists".

In plain language, solipsistic philosophy means adopting an attitude of simplicity toward the object of philosophical reflection. As Hegel says about this attitude: "It does not yet realize the contradiction contained in thought itself and its opposition to faith, but believes that it is possible to know the truth by the action of reflection alone, that it is possible to make the true nature of the object appear before consciousness. With this belief, thought proceeds to grasp the object directly, recreates the content of sensation and intuition as the content of thought itself, and in this way thinks that it has obtained the truth and is satisfied with it. All the early philosophies, all the sciences, and even all daily

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1. Hegel, The Little Logic, The Commercial Press, 1980 edition, p. 101.

2. Cited in Nicholas. Bunin et al., eds:: The English-Chinese Dictionary of Western Philosophy, People's Publishing House, 2001 edition, p. 273.

Ordinary life and conscious activity can be said to be lived in full dependence on such beliefs." In Hegel's view, the conclusions derived from solipsistic philosophy are not so much the result of thinking as of faith. The vegetative attitude of solipsistic philosophy is mainly manifested in the belief in the following three theoretical presuppositions: first, the things of the external world are themselves knowable; second, human sensation and cognition are reliable, and people can recognize the objects that recruit there through their senses and reason; third, the carrier of human consciousness, language, is reliable , people can use language to accurately express their thoughts and communicate with others without obstacles. In fact, in the belief in these three theoretical presuppositions, what is mainly involved are the first two theoretical presuppositions, as for the third theoretical presupposition, it is still basically in a marginalized and dormant state in Kant and the philosophers before Kant. Although the question of language is also mentioned in certain ancient philosophers, it is not thematized.

Interestingly, this almost faith-equivalent, vegetative solipsistic philosophy was already being questioned by some skeptics in antiquity. For example, the wise man Protagoras said, "As for the gods, I know neither whether they exist nor what they resemble. There are many things that we cannot recognize; questions are obscure, and life is short." Another wise man, Gorgia, came to the following three conclusions: first, "Nothing exists"; second, "If something exists, this thing is unrecognizable to man"; and third, "Even if this thing can be recognized, it is it is impossible to speak it out and tell it to others." The third point, in particular, involves a skepticism about the very medium of language. Gorgia further argues, "For the signal with which we tell others is language, which is not in itself something given and something that exists; therefore it is not something that exists that we tell others, but language, which is foreign to what is given. ...... It follows from this that language cannot communicate to others."

Clearly, the skepticism of the wise philosophers constitutes a challenge to the theoretical presuppositions of solipsistic philosophy. Whereas Socrates attempted to respond to the challenge of the wise philosophers by affirming conceptual knowledge, Plato conceded the sensible, visible world to the skeptics, only to firmly guard the world of ideas, constructed and static under Socratic revelation, for which Aristotle provided the laws of formal logic. Henceforth the position of the ancient solipsistic philosophy seems to have been consolidated. And during the long Middle Ages, as philosophy became the handmaiden of theology, the beliefs of theology further strengthened the beliefs of philosophy. Solipsistic philosophy reached its zenith of glory with philosophers such as Leibniz Wolff and Locke. However, the enemy of solipsistic philosophy, the idea of skepticism, continued to grow and swell unceasingly, and finally formed a monstrous wave that toppled the reign of solipsistic philosophy in Hume.

The reason why Hume's skepticism contains such a powerful force is not only because of his own insights, but also because of the great help he got from the philosophical thinking since Descartes, the originator of modern philosophy. As we all know, Descartes put forward the famous proposition of "I think, therefore I am", thus turning the philosophical vision to the reflection of the self. As Hegel said, "From Descartes onwards, philosophy shifted at once into a completely different sphere, a completely different point of view, that is, into the realm of subjectivity, into what is certain." In other words, from Descartes onward, the self awakens, and from then on, the philosopher's reflection on the self and the relation of the self to the other rises to become the basis and theme of philosophical reflection. The reasoning here is quite simple: since philosophy is thinking, and thinking emanates from the self, can the philosophical investigation of specific problems gain its certainty until the self itself is clarified? It is through this reflection on the self that Hume's skepticism gains its depth and power. In his view, the self is nothing more than a "bundle of perceptions," and the so-called "objective knowledge" that human beings have acquired and that is based primarily on causality is nothing more than habitual, indeterminate associations of the subjective mind. In this way, the edifice of traditional solipsistic philosophy was crushed by Hume's impregnable skepticism.

So it was Hume's skepticism, Kant frankly admits, that woke him up from his solipsistic philosophical slumber and pointed him in an entirely different direction of thinking. However, they had completely different opinions on how to deal with the ship of traditional metaphysics dominated by solipsism: "...to be on the safe side, he (Hume here, author's note) is putting his

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3. Hegel: The Little Logic, The Commercial Press 1980 edition, pp. 94-95.

4. Peking University, Department of Philosophy, Foreign Philosophy Teaching and Research Center, edited by: Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, Sanlian Bookstore, 1957 edition, page 138.

5. Peking University, Department of Philosophy, Foreign Philosophy Teaching and Research Center: Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy, Sanlian Bookstore, 1957 edition, page 138.

6. Peking University, Department of Philosophy, Foreign Philosophy Teaching and Research Office: Ancient Greco-Roman Philosophy, Sanlian Bookstore 1957 edition, pp. 142-143.

7. Hegel: Lectures on the History of Philosophy, Volume IV, Commercial Press, 1981 edition, page 69.

8. Kant: Introduction to the Metaphysics of the Future, Commercial Press, 1982 edition, p. 9.

of the ship to get it ashore (to get it to skepticism) and let it lie there to rot away. As for me, I do not take this course; I am giving it a pilot, and this pilot, according to the sound principles of seamanship derived from the knowledge of the earth, and provided with a detailed chart and a compass needle, can safely steer the ship wherever he pleases." In order to move beyond the traditional vision of solipsistic philosophy, and in order to keep his ego from being destroyed by Hume's skepticism, Kant modeled his critical philosophy on the innate field of mathematics. Critical philosophy makes the following three major distinctions:

One is the distinction between phenomena and the thing-self in the object of philosophical study. There is an unbridgeable gulf between phenomena, which belong to the sphere of experience, and the thing-self, which belongs to the sphere of the transcendental. To understand the knowledge of sense-experience as merely phenomenal fundamentally destroys and transcends traditional solipsistic philosophy, for whereas one of the illusions of solipsistic philosophy is that the knowledge of sense-experience grasps the Thing-Self, Kant proves that the Thing-Self is unknowable, and that only sensible phenomena, which the Thing-Self reveals to us, are cognizable. This distinction likewise transcends the infinite exaggeration of the importance of sense experience by Hume, who was an empiricist and skeptic.

The second is the distinction in knowledge between a priori form and empirical content. In Kant's view, any knowledge consists of two aspects: on the one hand, the innate forms of sensibility (time and space) and the twelve innate categories of knowing, which are forms that precede (meaning logically "precede", author's note) experience; and on the other hand, the material of acquired sense experience, from which the universal necessity of knowledge is secured. is secured from a priori forms. In this way, a priori theory again fundamentally supersedes Hume's skepticism, which can only disprove all metaphysical insights related to experience, but cannot disprove the justification of the entire a priori realm, which precedes and is separate from experience.

Third, it distinguishes between knowing and reason. According to Kant, the object of knowing is within the realm of phenomena, whereas the object of reason is the Idea (the world, the soul, and God), which belongs to the transcendental realm and is therefore unknowable. This fundamentally eliminates the possibility of a solipsistic way of thinking, which is essentially characterized by reason's attempts to apply the categories of knowing, which are appropriate only to the empirical sphere, to the supra-empirical realm, thus creating an endless stream of fallacies.

In short, once Kant's critical philosophy was established, solipsistic philosophy was fundamentally abandoned. Although there was a partial resurgence of solipsistic philosophy after Kant, and although people who don't read Kant after Kant will still be stuck within the solipsistic way of thinking, in truly rigorous philosophical thinking, solipsistic philosophy has fallen flat on its face.

The Second Great Turn: from Critical Philosophy to Existential Philosophy

In the history of the development of Western philosophy, the second great turn roughly refers to the stage of development from Kant's critical philosophy to Heidegger's existential philosophy. It is well ****known that Kant's critical philosophy had a great impact from its inception. However, the legacy of his doctrine is just as serious, and to put it in an extreme, Kant's critical philosophy has implied the fate of being surpassed from its birth. Commenting on Kant's philosophy, Wendelbein notes that "the cognitive faculty oscillates between the incomprehensible X of the subject and the equally incomprehensible X of the object. Sensibility has nothing after itself, knowing has nothing before itself."

By "the incomprehensible X of the subject" we mean the ego or "mind" (Gemuet), and although Kant discusses the three faculties of knowledge, emotion, and thought emanating from the mind at length, he does so in the same way as he does with the other faculties. Although Kant discusses at length the three faculties of knowledge, emotion, and thought emanating from the mind, he places the mind as "X" in the category of unrecognizable objects. In the Critique of Pure Reason, Kant poses three questions, namely, "What can I know?" "What should I do?" and "What can I hope for?" Later, in the Lectures on Logic, he posed a fourth question, "What is man?" However, his later Practical Anthropology remained silent on the study of the self or "mind". Later, in Being and Time and Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, Heidegger repeatedly criticized Kant for delaying reflection on the ontological basis of this being, for in Heinz's view, it is the ontology of this being that constitutes the philosophical basis for one's reflection on the ego or the "mind". This, of course, is an afterthought.

Moreover, by "the equally incomprehensible X of the object" we mean the transcendental object-self. In Kant's view, the object-self can be thought, but not known. This seems contradictory to some philosophers. For example, Hegel argues that what is thinking? To think is to stipulate in line, and the thing-self can be both thought and stipulated, and both stipulated and

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9. Kant, Introduction to the Metaphysics of the Future, The Commercial Press, 1982 edition, p. 12.

10.Wendelban: History of Philosophy Course, the next volume, Commercial Press, 1996 edition, p. 792.

can be known, and thus he made the bold conclusion in the Little Logic that things are knowable in themselves. And Schopenhauer goes even further; he does not remain within the confines of mere epistemology to question Kant's concept of the thing-self, but rather, from an ontological point of view, he deciphers the secret of the thing-self: "What is the thing that is self? It is - the will." For Schopenhauer, the will is the thing-self, the essence of the world. In this way, the thing-self, which is in the transcendental realm in Kant, is interpreted as the will, which is closely related to man's existential activity. That is to say, the thing-self is not at a distance; it is in all living beings. It is from this new position of the theory of existence that he overturns the thousands of years old case in the history of philosophy about "reason and cognition are first, life and will are second", and leads the whole philosophy to a new direction of thinking: "The will is the first and the most primitive; cognition is only a later add-on and is subordinate to the phenomenon of will as an instrument. subordinated to the phenomenon of the will as its instrument. Thus every man is by virtue of his will rather he is, and his character is also the most primitive, since desire is the base of his essence. "In this way, critical philosophy in the realm of epistemology is flipped into a philosophy of existence in the ontological sense.

After Schopenhauer, Marx further advanced the philosophy of existentialism by combining it with the study of economics. (This statement is debatable.) In The German Ideology, Marx wrote: "...we should first of all establish that the first presupposition of all human existence is also the first presupposition of all history, and that presupposition is this: that men, in order to be able to 'make history,' must be able to to live. But in order to live, one first needs clothing, food, shelter and other things. The first historical activity is therefore the production of the means to satisfy these needs, i.e., the production of material life itself." Engels went even further in understanding human history as a synergy of conflicting wills to survive. Correspondingly, Darwin's book The Origin of Species, published in 1859, also provided an important impetus for survivalist thinking. Indeed, the subsequent rise of pragmatist thinking also tended to account for human experience and knowledge in terms of existential activity. It is perhaps fair to say that with Heidegger, existential philosophical inquiry reaches unprecedented depths. Commenting on Kant's question "What is man?" states, "If man is man only on the basis of his here-and-now, then the inquiry into what is something more primitive than man cannot be any anthropological inquiry at all. All anthropology, even philosophical anthropology, already assumes man to be man." And in Hay's view, "What is more primitive than man is the finitude of man's here-and-now." He understood the doctrine of the finitude of the here-and-now as a foundational ontology, thus firmly establishing existentialism in the history of philosophy.

It is extremely instructive to examine in depth the development from Kant's critical philosophy to Heidegger's existential ontological philosophy. Although Kant's critical philosophy transcends traditional solipsistic philosophy, it is, in a sense, a philosophy without foundation because it lacks a deep reflection on the self or "mind". Thus, Hay's existential philosophy provides the ontological premise for critical philosophy, and it is in this sense that Hay says that to know is to be present in the world. In this way, philosophy is settled as an existential ontology. If existential philosophy is in any way intrinsically linked to critical philosophy, we might say that it inherits critical philosophy's pioneering of the realm of the a priori. For this reason, Hay does not hesitate to assert: "Insofar as philosophy is a philosophy that scientifically apprehends itself, 'a priori' is its method." For only the realm of the a priori, separate from sense experience, can ensure the universal validity of presuppositions, and this is one of the great legacies of Kant's critical philosophy.

The Third Great Turn: From Survivalist Philosophy to Contemporary Philosophy of Language

The third great turn in the history of Western philosophy is the turn from the survivalist philosophy initiated by Schopenhauer to the contemporary philosophy of language represented by Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Habermas.

Survival philosophy seems to have clarified the premises for all other philosophical thinking, but if we reflect y enough, we realize that the problem is much more complex than we thought. Let's start with the "*** in" that survivalist philosophy emphasizes. "*** in"

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11. Hegel wrote: "In fact, there can be nothing more easily known than the thing-self." See Little Logic, The Commercial Press, 1980 edition, p. 126.

12. Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation, Commercial Press, 1982 edition, p. 177.

13. Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Representation, Commercial Press, 1982 edition, pp. 401-402.

14. The Complete Works of Marx and Engels, Volume 3, People's Publishing House, 1960 edition, page 31.

15. Sun Zhouxing edited: Heidegger Selected Works on, Sanlian Bookstore 1996 edition, page 119.

16. Sun Zhouxing edited: Heidegger Selected Works on, Sanlian Bookstore 1996 edition, page 118.

17. Heidegger, Being and Time, Sanlian Bookstore 1987 edition, pp. 62-63 Note 1

Suggests that the existence of any individual is essentially to be with others***. In other words, in this world, there is no non-"*** in" way of existence, and even when a person feels very lonely, he still has not left the "*** in" way of existence, and in fact, his loneliness is the origin of his "*** in" way of existence, which is the "*** in" way of existence. In fact, his loneliness is a confirmation of his originating form of "****-in". It is clear that any "presence" is realized through linguistic ironic communication. In this sense, it can be said that there is no such thing as a bare survival activity separate from linguistic activity; survival is always situated in language and unfolds through language. In the development of twentieth-century philosophy, there was what Rorty called a "linguistic turn", and the question of language was emphasized as never before, to the extent that it was no longer understood simply as a medium between the researcher and the object of study, but as a foundational being.

We know that there are two sides to the study of linguistics: one is semantics; the other is pragmatics. Let us look at semantics first. In this area, Wittgenstein's role is unrivaled. In his early work, A Treatise on the Philosophy of Logic, he tells us:

4.003 ...... Most of the problems and propositions of philosophers are rooted in the fact that we do not understand the logic of language.

4.0031 All philosophy is Sprachkritik (not in the Mautnerian sense, of course). ......

5.6 The boundaries of my language imply the boundaries of my world.

In these brief remarks, language has been put at the center of philosophical thought, and Wittgenstein has even understood philosophy as a "critique of language". Although Wittgenstein's thinking changed significantly in later years, his emphasis on the problem remained the same, as he wrote in Philosophical Investigations:

203 Language is a labyrinth of many paths. When you come in from one side, you know the way; when you come to the same place from the other side, you do not know the way.

124 Philosophy cannot intervene in the actual use of language; it can ultimately only describe its actual use.

If early Wittgenstein attempted to establish a rigorous ideal language according to image theory, and understood philosophy as a "critique of language," late Wittgenstein abandoned such hopes, emphasizing that philosophy can neither create an ideal language nor provide a basis for everyday language, nor even interfere with the actual use of language. He emphasized that philosophy could neither create an ideal language nor provide a basis for everyday language, nor could it even interfere with the actual use of everyday language, but at most could only describe its actual use. Philosophers have often gotten into philosophical research by misunderstanding or misapplying the nature of language, just as flies get into flytraps. Wittgenstein felt that it was his task to save these philosophers from the fly-trap bottle. Wittgenstein's research influenced not only the Viennese School and the Oxford School of Everyday Language, but even the whole of contemporary philosophy.

Let us turn to pragmatics. In order to enable people to communicate effectively in "*** in" contexts, Habermas raised the question of universal pragmatics. In his book Interaction and Social Evolution, he begins by stating: "The task of universal pragmatics is to identify and reconstruct the universal conditions of possible understanding (Verstaendigung). In other contexts this has been called the 'general hypothetical presuppositions of interaction', whereas I prefer to use the expression 'general hypothetical presuppositions of interactional actions', because I regard such actions with the aim of attaining understanding as the most fundamental ones. " Needless to say, the reconstruction of universal pragmatics proposed by Habermas greatly highlights the role and significance of language in people's effective communicative activity.

Interestingly, Heidegger, a contemporary of Wittgenstein, also attached great importance to the problem of language.

In a conversation with Prof. Tomio Tsuka of the University of Tokyo in Japan, Heidegger said, "Earlier I used to call language, very clumsily, the House of Being (das Haus des Seins). If it is through his language that man inhabits the demands of the House of Being (Anspruch), then we Europeans may be inhabiting an entirely different house than the East Asians." Understanding language as the "house of being" and emphasizing that man's speech is subordinate to the speech of language itself, i.e., "man speaks only because he is in tune with language" constitutes an important dimension in Heidegger's thought.