Present History of Western Philosophy

Abstract

We have presented the history of Western philosophy as the story of ways in which reason has misrecognized its role in thinking truth. In Ancient Greece Plato and Aristotle exhibited the dialectical logic of this misrecognition. In the cultures of error that followed, Neoplatonism worked with this logic as the separation between thought and truth. In this separation subject and substance opposed each other, with subjectivity holding itself to be in error compared to the perfection of substance. In relation to this unknowable God, freedom became the work of human reason in and for itself. Freedom and God here have their determination in these same cultures of error.