Philosophy is composed of two parts, philo- meaning “love” and sophy referring to the goddess Sophia, the goddess (and concept) of Wisdom. Philosophy, then, means “love of Wisdom.” A philosopher is someone who is engaged in philosophy, and so has an active love of Wisdom. Examples of philosophy include logic, mathematics, natural theology, history, science, pragmatics, and engineering. To a certain extent, philosophy, or at least wisdom, is what being human is about. After all, we are Homo sapiens, meaning “wise man,” Homo being “man” or “human” and sapiens being “wise.” In other words, it is the capacity for wisdom that differentiates us from animals as well as from other members of our genus, such as Homo erectus, Homo heidelbergensis, Homo neanderthalensis, Homo denisova, and etc. These species are indeed human, as Homo means “human,” but they are not wise men. Remember, it is the capacity for being a wise man (or woman) that characterizes our species. But this characterization does not make everyone a philosopher, it merely points to the existence of philosophers among our species, something other species of Homo did not have. Will you be a defining element of our species? If so, you must become a philosopher. To do so, you should first acquaint yourself with a fair sampling of the thought of other philosophers who preceded you. If you value modern technology or civil society, you have philosophy to thank for that!
Before philosophy, the predominant forms of belief were animism and polytheism. Animism is the belief that there is some sort of spiritual force that is embodied in material objects, including those which are nonliving. Animism tends to see the world as operating according to the will and whim of spirits, who will be found in various natural settings. For instance, the movement of the wind may be considered to be the will of the wind to move. The leaders in animistic societies, both spiritual and sometimes political, are often known as shamans. Shamans will oftentimes have special roles within the band or clan that they are leading, including communication with the spirit world, which is believed to be accessed through psychological states that are in disequilibrium with the natural world, such as a trance or hallucination, which may be facilitated through drumming or entheogens such as magic mushrooms, burgot, or other fungal, plant, or animal sources. Shamanistic cultures may also engage in ancestor worship and, by extension, worship the dead, who are sometimes seen as having inhabited and become some force of Nature. As such, natural forces may be seen as the actions of ancestors. The mental states of animistic cultures are exceptionally poor in comparison to all succeeding groups, insofar as they cannot be said to be characterized by rational thinking, which we begin to see become more prominently with mythological systems that begin to establish hierarchies of causal categories. In fact, shamans in these cultures are often characterized by mental illnesses such as schizophrenia, gender dysphoria, and mania, whether they be induced through “crazy wisdom” or as a result of traumas or toxins in utero.
Over time, it was recognized that certain natural forces had more power than others. This was, to an extent, an early philosophical inference to explain the world as a system, though it was still expressed in metaphor rather than in deductive, inductive, or abductive logic. Those natural spirits which were seen as more powerful than the others became identified with gods, or spirits having special or important powers worthy of reverence. This often occurred through war, where one clan or tribe subjugated and assimilated another and its gods, with the proto-rational understanding that the conquered society's deities lacked the power belonging to the victors'. This was the birth of polytheism, the belief in many gods distinct from an animistic conception of natural spirituality. Much as the animistic spirits were seen to animate forces of Nature, the gods were also seen to be embodiments of natural powers. Volcanoes, mountains, earthquakes, rivers, seas, lightning, the Sun, Moon, and stars would all become deified, each being seen as having powers unequaled by other aspects of Nature. In reflection of their polytheism, these societies tend to be organized in an oligarchic fashion, by an inner, sometimes secret society of elite warriors and elders, sometimes organized around an oracle or priest who would continue on with shamanic traditions such as cleromancy, necromancy, and other such religious practices understood to connect to the spirit world.
Even influential chieftains, representing the interests of the warrior elite, elders, and priests who propped them up, could become deities. Indeed, the word God is derived from or cognate to the Gothic term for their chieftains, the Gothi or Godi. At first, favorite ancestors, remembered through song and story, were deified, and were sometimes said to inhabit the stars or other emblems of power. The treatment of chieftains as gods was especially solidified with the invention of monarchy, which followed the development of monotheism, the belief that there is only one God, who is the supreme power. Early stages of this process are known as henotheism and kathenotheism, and involve pantheon relationships where there may be a supreme deity and other lesser deities or serial worship of the deities in a particular order or fashion. The development toward strict monotheism was roughly around the timespan sometimes referred to as the Iron or Axial Age, which we may very loosely consider to be the timespan that people such as Akhenaten, Zoroaster, Abraham, Socrates, and Jesus came around. Monotheism typically involved the belief that all living things descended from or were created by a single Sky Father. In reflection of this belief, monarchy was understood to be a representative of the one true God on Earth who ruled by Divine Right.
It is important to understand that before the philosophers there were other lovers of Wisdom, who go by other titles. A wise man (or sometimes woman), for instance, was a man of great wisdom, who had accumulated much in the form of working heuristics, or “rules of thumb,” with regard to the way the world works, as well as basic facts of Nature. While there is sometimes overlap, the wise man is at times differentiated from Sophists (today, Sufis), who were similarly seen as wise, and who share Sophia, or Wisdom, in common with the philosophers in their title. They are also differentiated at times from Gnostics, or “Knowers,” who similarly claim much wisdom, though often of a different sort. For our purposes here, we will say that the wise men tended to be wise with regard to mundane wisdom, having to do with practical and earthly matters, whereas the Sophists tended to have an orientation somewhat more toward the profane, insofar as they tended to deny truth claims and were supporters of moral particularisms, and the Gnostics may be said to be concerned with sacred matters, having to do with religion and idealism. This distinction is not absolute, but serves as more of an orienting generalization. For instance, Sophism and Gnosticism are too often paired to make a strict distinction. And the wise men who authored the Wisdom Books in The Bible dealt with religious matters, though in a way that grounds them in mundane reality. Polytheistic societies are often characterized by a sense of Rhyme that we may understand to temporally precede Reason, insofar as they are often characterized by poetry and symbolic prose. This is typical of what we may consider to fall within the Wisdom Tradition, which was beginning to differentiate itself from unnatural or supernatural religion. Whereas religion tended to rely upon the revelations of shamans and priests, Wisdom involved self-reflection and considerations of physical reality.
Polytheistic systems tended to become characterized by magical beliefs. Magic is the art of getting what one wants from the world, or making the world act according to one's will. The Gnostics, for instance, tended to be practitioners of High Magic or white magic, also known as theurgy, which focused on such sacred things as achieving possession by God or angelic deities so as to be deified or gain enlightenment. The Sophists tended to be a secularizing development of Goetica, or Low Magic, and in particular black magic, insofar as they were concerned with the profane art of manipulating others to get what they want from them, and were a continuation of shamanism. Because of the secularizing nature of the Sophists, who would become the world's first lawyers (perhaps except for the Lawspeakers of Germanic societies), this may be considered to be a development toward a dark green magic, as it combines elements of black magic and green or natural magic. Green magic was the purview of the wise men and mystical philosophers, who focused on the mundane understanding the natural world. Green magic such as astrology, alchemy, and mechanics is the precursor to scientific disciplines such as astronomy, chemistry, and engineering. Green magic often takes insights from both High and Low or white and black magic, and may be considered a variety of gray magic, or magic that is neutral in value content.
Philosophers may be said to have come primarily from out of the tradition of the wise men. The main distinction between the philosophers and the wise men may be that the wise men tended to accumulate common sense observations, whereas the philosophers added to these observations rational structures of logic, which extended observations into a deeper understanding of natural causation. Philosophers tell us something of the results of the insights of the wise men. Whereas the wise men had much to say about how to exist in the world, the philosophers had much to say with regard to the operations of the world as a result of, or in challenge to, these sorts of observations. For instance, natural historians and chroniclers portrayed a world of causality in their histories, scientists (who themselves are philosophers of a sort) demonstrated a world of causality in their experiments, natural theologians explained the world as a development toward a final end, and natural philosophers more generally described the world as operating according to necessities, including laws and principles that could allow for things to be known before they happen. It is no accident that the philosophers appear after writing had allowed the wise men to share their wisdom far and wide and througout time. The philosophers are who would succeed the wise men by building atop the accumulated wisdom of pre-rational categorical hierarchies, facts of Nature, and rules of thumb. Today, philosophy has been compounded, being built atop other philosophies.
Natural philosophy itself begins formally with the ancients of Greece, before developing largely independently in India, and combining during Hellenization of the later Iron Age or Classical Antiquity, but it arguably has earlier roots in Egyptian Hermeticism and Hermetic Phoenicians such as Sanchuniathon. Sanchuniathon, in particular, declared that the gods of the religionists were simply metaphors for natural causes that could be understood more rationally, and that were understood more rationally by the esoteric priesthoods. At least a part of secular Greek philosophy may be considered to be attributable to these insights by Sanchuniathon and probably many others like him. The pre-Socratic philosophers were primarily concerned with metaphysical and physical matters more than with matters of morality or ethics.
Natural philosophy is popularly contrasted against religion. And, depending on how religion is defined, this can be quite accurate, especially with regards to claims that are divorced from natural epistemological foundations, such as facts of Nature. Philosophy generally stood in opposition to religion and religious sources of political power. This does not mean that philosophers do not engage in religious analogy or in political power-- this is true only of strict atheists or antitheists and anarchists among the philosophers-- , but rather that these are not the elements that characterize philosophy. Indeed, natural theology and idealist metaphysics are found among the natural philosophers, though they are argued from Reason, with regard to the causal nature of Reality. It may also be argued that certain bases of religion have their foundation in an early conception of naturalism that was expressed in terms of analogy, rather than in terms of logical deduction, induction, and abduction. Insofar as one admits an epistemological value to analogy, one may treat certain religious foundations as philosophical. Indeed, natural philosophy is not itself entirely divorced from analogies, which are readily found in the works of natural theologians such as Plato, in his analogy of the cave. And certain natural theologies, especially those such as pantheism, emanationism, deism, and rational idealism function well as bases for natural philosophy more generally. The sort of religion that philosophy is properly contrasted against is that sort which aims to limit further inquiry. Philosophy, being the love of Wisdom, naturally finds itself at odds with those who would impose their beliefs, and restrict the beliefs of others, forcefully, and especially when the imposed beliefs can be demonstrated to be false or unfounded. Among the philosophers, a wide range of beliefs or understandings have been come to, including views of natural theology such as pantheism and deism, as well as skeptical approaches such as agnosticism and atheism, and a full range of political perspectives, though tending toward the liberal and democratic or republican, with the atheist and the anarchist, perhaps, representing the extreme distancing from church and state. Again, this extreme distancing is not a requirement of philosophy, but does help us to orient our generalizations about it.
Philosophy, or at least elements of it, can also be veiled by religion, being found in the esoteric or secret form of the religion, while the outward, public expression of it is exoteric. In this case, apparently meaningless analogies may be used to secretly convey philosophical truths. However, oftentimes the “philosophy” offered will be quite flawed, or even wrong, and based more in Sophistry than in true philosophy, though it may be given a philosophical veneer. While philosophy may at times have some overlaps with Gnostic conceptions of metaphysics, with gnostic traditions such as Hermeticism having some claim itself to natural philosophy and some relation to deism and pantheism, the two can also be at odds, particularly if Gnosticism tends to veer into the territory of irrationalism or to intermix itself with sophistry or profane religious views. Both Sophistry and Gnosticism can have a tendency to divorce themselves from the mundane matters of morality and ethics, and of physics, which are a major focus within natural philosophy extending as far back as its predecessors, the wise men. And both Sophistry and Gnosticism tend to view the natural, mundane world as somehow not fully real or necessary.
Thales was probably the first natural philosopher, or at least the first we know of to reference. He was known for many things, among them predicting weather events and eclipses, which was typically done by priests to display their power (suggesting even that they were in control of such events). He was also an accomplished geometer and engineer. Thales believed that water was the primary substance or contained the ruling principle of the Universe, one of the earliest examples of a naturalistic explanation for Nature. Along with four others, he would be included among the Seven Sages of Greece, along with Pittacus, who was a politican who started to break down the Greek oligarchy, and Solon, who finally established democratic control over Athens, which would eventually become the leading center of Greek philosophy.
Thales would be followed by others such as Anaximander, who believed instead in a sort of aether he called the “Apeiron,” out which all opposites or polarities came. Like Thales, his elder fellow in Miletus, he was an accomplished polymath, having mapped the Earth and concluded upon its spherical form, and having developed a time-keeping device. Another Milesian philosopher was Anaximenes, who believed that everything was composed of varying densities of air. Around the same general time, other schools of philosophy were appearing. Ionian philosophy, which began with Thales and included the Milesians, had also produced Pythagoras, who developed a complex mathematical and mystical philosophy, whereby everything proceeds from a geometrical point and operates in a harmonious fashion. The Pythagoreans have been seen as having commonalities with Druidry of Celtic societies and the Druze of the Levant, being a secretive or esoteric approach toward philosophy.
Parmenides would kick of Eleatic philosophy when his rational approach to monist ontology declared that Being exists while nonbeing does not, such that all things are permanent and unchanging as a single Whole, the One, while all change is ultimately illusory, a sentiment similar to some expressions of Vedic philosophy. Like Anaximander, he concluded the Earth, like the Monad, was spherical. Heraclitus from Ephesus, a Persian-controlled city, denied Parmenides unchanging Monad, and instead posited a process monism whereby the One existed as a unity of opposites found to engage in constant flux which was held together by Logos, a logical order or Reason. A follower of Parmenides named Anaxagoras, possibly aware also of Heraclitus, argued in explanation of the experience of change that all bodies are composed of primary elements that are arranged by nous, or “mind,” which was also an animating force, and in a way takes the place of Parmenides' One. Empedocles argued that the primary elements were arranged according to either Love or Strife, which he saw as the primary opposition in the Universe.
Leucippus and Democritus argued that since motion was observable, then nothing must actually exist in some way, and so established the concept of an actually-existing void in which atoms, or little points of existence, can combine, be separated, and recombine to form greater bodies. This was all to happen according to deterministic laws. Epicurus much later, and after the time of Socrates, argued that these laws were governed by a fundamental structure of the Universe, which he referred to as the “Swerve,” perhaps relatable somehow to the sinewave-like pattern of the procession of the equinoxes.
Pythagorean philosophy had not ceased. In fact, philosophers such as Philolaous were developing it further, by suggesting that there was a limiting principle that acted upon and have form to the limited. This was toward the end of what we know as pre-Socratic philosophy.
Socratic philosophy has been used as a benchmark for the development of philosophy largely owing to the moral focus that Socrates would bring to philosophy. Socrates asked us to live an examined life filled with critical thinking that allowed us to move beyond our preconceptions. Socrates proclaimed his own total ignorance, and established a method of inquiry involving repeated questioning of basic philosophical foundations, often leading to skepticism. Nonetheless, this seems to be a part of his conception of moral virtue, which he connected to intellectual pursuit of Wisdom. A monotheist, he believed that one should come to know oneself by knowing God, and worship God by becoming wise rather than through religious rituals, holding God to be inherently good and just. For Socrates, the cause of evil is the absence of Wisdom. The presence of Socrates would change the course of philosophy, leading metaphysical questions to inquiries with regard to what it means to live a virtuous, and so happy, life.
The most famous of Socrates's students was Plato. Plato is most famous for his idealist philosophy, which held that there is a world of forms distinct from but affecting physical reality, in fact being its highest form. Probably a natural development from Pythagorean geometry, it was also a way to reconcile the One of Parmenides with the flux of Heraclitus. According to Plato, the Form of the Good was the greatest of them all. Platonists held that the forms were real, and in fact constituted a higher reality than that of a perceptual world. Continuing with this tradition to some extent, but also significantly differentiating itself was the Peripatetic School of Aristotle.
Aristotle, a student of Plato, retained elements of Plato's forms, but considered form to be one cause among three others, which included the innate properties of matter, mechanical or efficient causation, and final or teleological retrocausation. As with Plato, forms were seen to have an existence in some connection with a higher reality, but Aristotle makes explicit that this is situated in the very real future, and thereby gives way to a process of development that we may consider to be proto-evolutionary in explanation. For Aristotle, all things are composed of Prime Matter and are set into motion by a Prime Mover, sometimes considered to relate to Parmenides's One, and are ultimately given a form that operates toward a final cause, or telos. Aristotle stressed the importance of living a virtuous life in community with others, surrounded by friends. In a certain respect, Aristotle's efforts appear as a grand synthesis of all of prior philosophy, aiming to reconcile its entire catalogue of contradictions. As a result, Aristotle has been named the father of many fields, among them biology and economics. The Peripatetic School, continued by Theophrastus and others, tended to dominate philosophy for some time, though it did find some competition from the Cynics, Epicureans, Skeptics, and Stoics, among others.
In short, the Cynics continued from Socratic foundations, and focused on living a virtuous life that did not force conformity with unnatural demands of society, such as that one pursue status and wealth. Included among the Cynics has, at times, been Jesus, interestingly enough, though he has also been claimed by sects ranging as widely as Therapeuts and Gnostics. In a way, the Cynics may also be considered to be a continuation of the Heraclitean perspective that presupposes flux and change.
The Epicureans focused on ataraxia, or freedom from suffering, as opposed to the eudaemonia of the followers of Socrates, which was a statement of flourishing rather than absence of suffering. The Epicureans also tended to be more, like the atomists, hedonistic in their pursuits, somewhat moreso than the Aristotlean, who also does not deny material pleasures. Like the Peripatetics, however, there was a strong focus on the importance of friendship and living a life in communion with others.
The skeptical philosopher Pyrrho, like the Epicureans, was also in pursuit of ataraxia, but endeavored to achieve this by suspending judgement and denying the ultimate truth content of all final conclusions, in some ways similar to Buddhism, which Pyrrhonists found some affinity with when meeting for the first time in mass during the onsloughts of the army of Alexander the Great into India, where they mingled with their fellow Indo-Europeans the Indo-Scythians otherwise known as the Saka, the Buddha being Shakyamuni, the “Sage of the Saka.” There was similarly an affinity established between Pythagoreans and Buddhists with regard to vegetarian eating, which the Pythagoreans had followed Pythagoras in and the Buddhists had been inspired to by the Jains. These sorts of interactions contributed to the cosmopolitanism of Hellenistic society. Pyrrhonists, or “skeptics,” never commit to a final resolution, though they do have to act in the world. Their approach to human action is that they act pragmatically according to their best judgment at the moment, which is subject to revision at any future moment. The extent to which skepticism should be considered to be related to Sophistry is subject to debate.
Cynicism was developed into the philosophy of Stoicism when the Phoenician Zeno of Citium lost all of his wealth in the sinking of a merchant vessel at sea and decided that all losses could be bared. Like Heraclitus, whom he followed, he held that all things were composed of a flux composed of fire, and that Nature was synonymous with God, a pantheistic sentiment that would come to characterize philosophy as a whole, though as an orienting generalization rather than as a universal fact. Like the Peripatetics, whom the Stoics would also draw from now and again, the Stoics were concerned with systems of logic and living a life of virtue in accordance with Nature, which they similarly held operated according to natural laws of causality.
Platonism would continue or be revived with thinkers such as Plotinus, who argued, similar to Pythagoras and Parmenides, for an all-encompassing and immanent, but also transcendent and monistic One. The One emanated reality from its very central Source of full, ultimate reality, with all things owing their being to the greater reality found in this Source. This Source may be distinguished from what the Gnostics referred to as the pleroma, or outter reaches of the One. Indeed, the neo-Platonists and Gnostics shared many outlooks and in some ways were in competition with one another. Poryphyry and Iamlichus are famous exemplars of this school, being followers also of neo-Pythagoreanism, which was often combined into neo-Platonism alongside Peripatetic and Stoic insights.
These sorts of philosophies tended to dominate the civilized portions of Mediterranean society, namely Hellenistic Greece and Rome, but also in Anatolia and the Levant, until the rise of Christianity, which was typically opposed by the classical philosophers, but also tended to combine elements of Greek philosophy with the emerging Samaritan and Jewish biblical historicism and Wisdom literature of the Old Testament, perhaps with insights as well from Gnosticism and Eastern philosophies or philosophical religions such as Zoroastrianism, Taoism, Theraveda Buddhism.
Philosophers in general want to know what the world is, what it is like, how we know, and what to do about it. In short, philosophers want to know what it means to live a good life, one that is enjoyable and productive of ends that we are pursuing, and use an understanding of the natural world, including their own living experiences, to live that life toward those ends. While philosophers may also pursue deep, final ends, what characterizes the philosopher, and distinguishes the philosopher from an unnatural theologian, is that the philosopher is concerned with engaging with the world as if it is somehow of consequence, or understanding its existence as being of conequence, rather than something that can simply be ignored. That is, the philosopher-- even one like Parmenides who tells us that our experiential perspective is limited in almost a Gnostic sort of way based on the observation that nothing comes from nothing-- is on some level or other a world-affirmer. This differentiates the philosopher from the ex nihilo Creationist, the Sophist solipsist, and the immaterialist Gnostic, as well as from Eastern worldviews such as Buddhism, with Eastern wise men or sages like Lao Tzu being closer to a philosopher than religionists such as Buddha or Jesus, though each have their philosophical moments.
Philosophy matters because it tells us how to live a good life by remaining true to our conscience and accepting the physical and psychological consequences of our actions. Without philosophy, one is basically wandering around in spacetime without a map or an operating program, at least one that is not licentious, narcissistic, psychopathic, or factitious. Philosophy, that is, allows one to learn to be a better person with a well-developed character, and so to reduce such vicious qualities of stunted personality as these. To an extent, it may be fair to consider philosophy an act of self-therapy administered in a world that has not yet come to its senses or evolved the sagacity that is supposed to characterize our species. Indeed, it seems that such a sagacity is more of an orienting generalization itself than it is a universal aspect of being a Homo sapien. Philosophy, in concerning itself with the natural causes of the world and the requirements of living a good life, is, at least in part, an effort to establish a coherent worldview that corresponds to reality. This distinguishes it from the cognitive dissonance and incongruent beliefs that characterize pre-rational and irrational worldviews, such as unnatural or supernatural religion, which have more in common with what we recognize as mental instability than with Wisdom. Indeed, it has been theorized that before the development of rational thought, the brain's hemispheres had not been fully fused together, leading to a bicameral mind that functioned much like that of a schizophrenic. The coherence of rational thought seems to have some connection to the fusing of the brain's hemispheres. And this, an escape from our schizophrenic foundations, may be seen as an act of therapy that contributes to peace of mind and acceptance of things as they are.
Gnostic, Zealot, and other rebel groups were posing a threat to the Roman Empire, and had already pushed it toward Christianity by the time Rome would be toppled by the Phoenician, Celtic, Iranic, Turkic, and Germanic tribes, among them the Carthagineans, Britons, Alans, Huns, and Goths. The toppling of already corrupted and Christianizing Rome would deal a great blow to secular philosophy, and would plunge Europe into the Dark Ages, a period of considerable philosophical stagnation identified by later Renaissance thinker Petrarch. Perhaps the greatest exception to the complete darkness of the time was the light provided by Eriugena, an Irish pantheist monk who synthesized what remained of philosophy into a comprehensive system of Nature. According to Eriugena, who is often placed into the neo-Platonic tradition, God is all that does and does not exist, being the totality of all things and a unity of opposites.
Eventually, the Islamic Golden Age and Arab invasions into Spain brought Sufis into Southwestern Europe, and with them Arabic translations of Greek philosophy which had been lost during the Dark Ages, including those of Plato and Aristotle. Alongside Eriugena, the re-emergence of Greek philosophy and the practice of comparative religion would inspire other important philosophers of Medieval Europe, inspiring resistance among the Radical Reformers and heretics such as Peter Waldo, Amalric of Bena, David of Dinant, Jan Hus, Lucilio Vanini, and Giordano Bruno, as well as modernizing Catholics such as Nicholas of Cusa, Marsillio Ficino, and Giovani Pico della Mirandola, thereby bringing about the Renaissance. Also of monumental importance was the impact this would have on then-popular science, such as was forwarded by thinkers such as Roger Bacon and then by Nicholas Copernicus, Johannes Kepler, and Gallileo Gallilei, who reaffirmed the centrality of the Sun in the solar system and established laws of planetary motion, alongside others mentioned such as Giordano Bruno. It must be remembered that, at this time, science and engineering was still generally considered to be an endeavor of mundane green magic, which was itself at times equated to witchcraft, especially when taking inspiration from Goetica.
The Inquisition against the Renaissance naturalists and Radical Reformer religionists, which saw many of them mutilated, tortured, and executed, would plunge Europe into a period of religious wars between the Catholics and the emerging Protestant traditions and their allies, which included Jews, relict pagans, and atheists. This had a secularizing effect, insofar as it produced the Scientific Revolution of people such as Giordano Bruno, Renes Descartes, Francis Bacon, and Isaac Newton, and the Enlightenment, which sought widespread freedom of religion and separation of political affairs from the state, as pursued by people such as Baruch Spinoza, John Locke, John Toland, Matthew Tindal, the Baron de Holbach, Denis Diderot, and others, corresponding early on with the emigration from Europe to the Americas by Puritans upon the Mayflower and succeeding missions, and leading up to the American, French and successive Revolutions. The Scientific Revolution had seen massive strides in philosophy, being enabled like the Reformation and Renaissance by the power of the newly-invented printing press, which allowed for documents to be widely disseminated. This was similar in impact to the invention of writing that had enabled philosophy in the first place. The Enlightenment had turned the focus of philosophy largely to secular political ends such as freeing the individual from ecclesiastical and artistocratic tyranny that hindered philosophical pursuits such as those of the Renaissance and Scientific Revolution.
After the successful republican revolutions of the American and French Revolutions, which had largely owed their successes to secret philosophical fraternities such as Freemasonry, modernist philosophy developed (some suggest it developed during the Renaissance, but for our purposes we are using this definition). Modernist philosophy was in a way a continuation of Radical Enlightenment philosophy that had not yet been realized in the Moderate Enlightenment Revolutions, such as those in America and France. Modernism wanted to continue with the democratizing and secularizing efforts of the Enlightenment, but also delved deeper into matters of science and engineering, including the geological, biological, and social sciences, such as paleontology, evolutionary anthropology, economics, and sociology, as well as thermodynamics and electricity, the seeds of which had been planted in the Enlightenment but were now generally free to sprout without state interference and were beginning to really drive society along a progressive course, contributing for the first time since the Bronze Age to a noticeable net growth in overall prosperity for the lowest classes in society, freeing them from the standards and qualities of living found among peasants of agrarian societies. Unfortunately, this was not going to last long.
Traditionalist and post-modernist forces, sometimes inspired by Renaissance views that refused to progress to Enlightenment thinking, had infiltrated the Enlightenment fraternities, being supported by major financial interests of the recently-emerged banking elite in league with clergy and elements of the aristocracy, which had basically kept the Radical Enlightenment from becoming realized through efforts to co-opt it, thus having brought about the stunted version, the Moderate Enlightenment. Major institutions involved in this include Counter-Enlightenment fraternities such as the Catholic Society of Jesus (Jesuits) and the Lutheran Rosicrucian Order, the Order of the Illuminati, as well as the East India companies and major banking families, such as the Salomons (who financed the American Revolution) and Rothschilds, typically coming from a tradition of Court Jewry. Efforts were made to establish secret governments through philosophies such as synarchism, to take control of the economy through the establishment of business magnates and trusts, as well as to distort the popular definitions of words in the press houses and then universities in order to change the meaning of radical messages. Overall, the trajectory was one of re-instituting religious control in substance, but in the form of science practicing a rigid scientism and psychological solipsism that somehow married hyper-objectivity with hyper-subjectivity, demanding simultaneously that there is no objective truth and that science be utilized as the only referent to truth, albeit one that demonstrates that no such truth exists and that everything is culturally relative. In short, an absurdity. The result has been concentration of power and wealth and a generalized antagonism known as the culture wars. This is where we find ourselves today, a point of general decline in philosophy that has degenerated toward pre-modern mindsets and attitudes. Whereas philosophy had once found an enemy in religion, religion has now been largely replaced by passive entertainment such as novels, comic books, videos, and video games, with fictional characters serving the roles that the gods once did of preoccuppying the victim and polluting their worldview with senseless make-believe, of special importance being that it reinforces or reifies the hegemonious paradigm of the rulers. The multitude is replete with ignorance and inadequate ideas. The Sophist element has made a major comeback. The population has sensed this, and has tried to turn to conservative religion, thus falling right into the plans of the Counter-Enlightenment, whose post-modern efforts aim to secretly re-establish pre-modern thought control with a scientific sensibility.
Philosophy can lead to specialties in knowledge, such as areas of metaphysics or theology, periods of history, or scientific disciplines such as cosmology, biology, or sociology, for example. This sort of specialism is flawed in that it can become weaponized through compartmentalization and analysis paralysis. It is arguable that the most prestigious attempts in philosophy are attempts to establish ideology. Ideology is the arrangement of all ideas into a comprehensive system, much petrology, for instancem, is the arrangement of all rocks and minerals of the Earth into a comprehensive system, or geology is the sorting of the implications of petrology and the workings of the Earth into a comprehensive system. The ultimate goal of a philosophical system should not be to specialize and maintain inner consistency, but to generalize and establish coherence between all fields of knowledge, with the aim of categorizing and cataloguing all of the natural forces of the Universe and their natural consequences. Without such a generalized worldview, one will be reduced to compartmentalized thinking, where incongruences with other departments or specialties of others will produce weaknesses and contradictions that demonstrate one's view to be false by being incomplete or out of balance with what is known about the world when collective knowledge is considered. For instance, the clash between physics and the thermodynamic arrow of time and biology with its biological arrow of time produces a fundamental disagreement between these fields that was only resolved through the multidisciplinary or cross-disciplinary efforts of philosophers such as Luigi Fantappie, in his Unitary Theory of the Biological and Physical World. It is precisely this sort of grand narrative that postmodernism has attempted to destroy.