Abstract
Is today’s global philosophy impoverished because philosophers do not regard themselves as joining hands with philosophers of the past, but rather attempt to pose and encounter problems as if they had not been posed and encountered by those who preceded them? This chapter offers a preliminary answer by briefly surveying the origins and growth of the philosophies of Plato, Aristotle, Kant, and Husserl, some of the Great Philosophers who stood “on the shoulders of giants.” Their own knowledge of their predecessors informed and contributed to their philosophical development and enabled a historical community of inquiry to come into being. This chapter points to the need to climb the giants’ shoulders once again; to return to essential problems with which Kant and others wrestled; and, with insights from Plato, Husserl, and many more, posit solutions and directions for philosophy that will both collaborate with the past and create renewed progress in philosophical thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
The Divided Line contains some of the most key insights to be found in the Platonic corpus. Found in Book VI of the Republic, it divides knowledge from opinion and belief and locates knowledge, in the Platonic sense, as belonging only to mathematics and philosophy and relegates what today we think of as science, as well as art, to the realm of mere belief or opinion.
- 2.
How ironic that perhaps the most famous and influential commentary on Hume was written by a philosopher who read Hume in a translation and not in his original language. This is also true of the great commentary of Aquinas on Aristotle, who read Aristotle in Latin and not in Aristotle’s original Greek.
- 3.
Though Kant himself did not use the term “Copernican revolution,” it is a term in common use among commentators. In the present author’s opinion, it is easily inferred from his discussion of Copernicus. Cf., Critique of Pure Reason, Bxvi, Bxxii, n.
- 4.
For a discussion of the details of this, cf., Robert Elliott Allinson, Space, Time and the Ethical Foundations (London & New York: Routledge Revivals, 2019); also translated into Chinese by Jiangsu People’s Press Overseas in Nanjing, 时间、空间与伦理学基础, 江苏人民出版社, 2015.
- 5.
Raphael originally entitled his fresco in the Apostolic Palace in the Vatican City Causarum Cognitio (Knowledge of the Causes), the title indicating a more precise though oversimplified understanding of the famous competing directions of the pointings of Plato and Aristotle. For the original title of the fresco, the present author is indebted to Dag Herbjørnsrud, “The Quest for a Global Age of Reason, Part II, Cultural Appropriations and Racism in the name of Enlightenment,” Guest Editor, Robert Elliott Allinson, Dialogue and Universalism 31, no. 3 (2021): 133–155.
- 6.
Consider his famous statement “What is rational is real; And what is real is rational” that he makes in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right.
- 7.
Phenomenology of Spirit, Preface, §20. This despite the Hegelian claim in §22 of the Introduction to his Encyclopedia that, “We said above that, according to the old belief, it was the characteristic right of the mind to know the truth. If this be so, it also implies that everything we know both of outward and inward nature, in one word, the objective world, is in its own self the same as it is in thought and that to think is to bring out the truth of our object, be it what may.” Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, translated by William Wallace (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1873). The problem is that Hegel produced too few of these individual insights. One that he did produce, the nature of the Master-Slave relationship, is couched in such an obscure terminology that it is difficult to discern the phenomenological or empirically applicable nature of the relationship that signifies the concrete quality of its truth value. Cf., Phenomenology of Spirit, §189–191. The discussion of the Master-Slave relationship continues below. The present author utilizes the translation of Master-Slave instead of the more accurate translation of Lord and Bondsman both because of its wider recognition and because of its more obvious historical and social applications.
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Allinson, R.E. (2022). Standing on the Shoulders of Giants. In: Awakening Philosophy. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-08300-6_2
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