PHILOSOPHY - From the Pre-Socratics to Post-Structuralism
PHILOSOPHY - From the Pre-Socratics to Post-Structuralism
From the first questions of the Pre-Socratics to the intricate debates of post-structuralism, this volume presents a complete and continuous arc of Western philosophical thought in a single work. PHILOSOPHY: From the Pre-Socratics to Post-Structuralism traces the long movement from myth to rational explanation, from cosmos to subject, from system to critique, showing how ideas of being, truth, freedom, and power were formed, challenged, and transformed over more than two millennia.
Structured in four parts and twenty-five chapters, the book unfolds with historical rigor and conceptual clarity. It begins with Thales, Heraclitus, Parmenides, and the first cosmologies, advances through Socrates, Plato, and Aristotle, and explores philosophy as a way of life in Stoicism, Epicureanism, and Skepticism. The transition to Late Antiquity and Neoplatonism reveals philosophy as both metaphysical inquiry and spiritual discipline.
The medieval world is treated as a complex intellectual landscape rather than a mere bridge between antiquity and modernity. Augustine, Byzantine thinkers, and Islamic and Jewish philosophers appear alongside the Latin scholastic tradition, where questions of faith and reason, law and universals, and nature and creation are systematically examined. Scholasticism, nominalism, and humanism are presented as responses to deep crises of authority, knowledge, and meaning.
The early modern transformation marks a decisive shift. The Scientific Revolution, Rationalism, Empiricism, Social Contract theory, and the Enlightenment are shown as interconnected attempts to reconstruct knowledge, subjectivity, and political legitimacy. Descartes, Spinoza, Locke, Hume, Rousseau, and Kant emerge within a shared debate on certainty, experience, freedom, and moral autonomy.
The nineteenth and twentieth centuries introduce powerful systems and radical critiques. German Idealism, Positivism, Marxism, the philosophy of suspicion (Nietzsche, Freud), Phenomenology, Hermeneutics, Existentialism, Critical Theory, Pragmatism, Analytic philosophy, Structuralism, and Deconstruction are each examined in their internal logic and historical impact. Thinkers such as Hegel, Marx, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, Foucault, and Derrida frame debates on history, science, language, ideology, and power.
A defining feature of this work is the systematic integration of women philosophers across all periods. Teano, Aspasia, Diotima, Hypatia, Macrina, Hildegard of Bingen, Marguerite Porete, Elisabeth of Bohemia, Damaris Masham, Mary Wollstonecraft, Hannah Arendt, Simone de Beauvoir, G. E. M. Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Judith Butler, and Angela Davis are presented not as exceptions, but as essential contributors to the philosophical tradition.
Each chapter combines historical context with conceptual analysis, revealing how philosophical ideas emerge from concrete problems-cosmological, theological, scientific, political-and how they continue to shape contemporary debates on reason, justice, identity, and meaning.
PHILOSOPHY: From the Pre-Socratics to Post-Structuralism is both a panoramic history and a conceptual map of Western thought-rigorous, inclusive, and attentive to philosophy as an ongoing, unfinished inquiry.
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