{"id":100465,"date":"2017-08-31T21:50:51","date_gmt":"2017-09-01T05:50:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/?p=189158"},"modified":"2017-08-31T21:50:51","modified_gmt":"2017-09-01T05:50:51","slug":"two-thousand-years-of-philosophy-on-the-margin","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/2017\/08\/31\/two-thousand-years-of-philosophy-on-the-margin\/","title":{"rendered":"Two thousand years of philosophy on the margin"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0199656495\/geneexpressio-20\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"alignleft size-full wp-image-189159\" src=\"http:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/wp-content\/uploads\/2017\/08\/historyofphilosophy.jpeg\" alt=\"\" width=\"181\" height=\"278\" \/><\/a>A little less than two years ago I began to read Anthony Kenny&#8217;s <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/0199656495\/geneexpressio-20\">A New History of Western Philosophy<\/a>. It&#8217;s a big book, on the order of ~1000 pages. But that&#8217;s not the reason I&#8217;m just now finishing it. The book is divided by chronologically and thematically. <b>I read about the ancients in about a week, but struggled to get past the medieval section.<\/b> I&#8217;ve mentioned this before.<\/p>\n<p>And yet in my self-pity I did wonder: is this partly just a function of the fact that ancient philosophy provided most of the answers (or non-answers) in what we think of as philosophy over a few centuries? As they say, perhaps the rest is simply commentary and extension.<\/p>\n<p>If society collapsed and we reverted to barbarism it seems it would be a loss if we didn&#8217;t have the <a href=\"https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/exec\/obidos\/ASIN\/B011SFJSJO\/geneexpressio-20\">Principia<\/a>. But if we had philosophy up to Seneca, would we miss what came after?<\/p>\n<p><a class=\"a2a_button_facebook\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/facebook?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F08%2F31%2Ftwo-thousand-years-of-philosophy-on-the-margin%2F&amp;linkname=Two%20thousand%20years%20of%20philosophy%20on%20the%20margin\" title=\"Facebook\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_button_twitter\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/twitter?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F08%2F31%2Ftwo-thousand-years-of-philosophy-on-the-margin%2F&amp;linkname=Two%20thousand%20years%20of%20philosophy%20on%20the%20margin\" title=\"Twitter\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_button_google_plus\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/add_to\/google_plus?linkurl=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F08%2F31%2Ftwo-thousand-years-of-philosophy-on-the-margin%2F&amp;linkname=Two%20thousand%20years%20of%20philosophy%20on%20the%20margin\" title=\"Google+\" rel=\"nofollow noopener\" ><\/a><a class=\"a2a_dd addtoany_share_save\" href=\"https:\/\/www.addtoany.com\/share#url=https%3A%2F%2Fgnxp.nofe.me%2F2017%2F08%2F31%2Ftwo-thousand-years-of-philosophy-on-the-margin%2F&amp;title=Two%20thousand%20years%20of%20philosophy%20on%20the%20margin\" data-a2a-url=\"https:\/\/gnxp.nofe.me\/2017\/08\/31\/two-thousand-years-of-philosophy-on-the-margin\/\" data-a2a-title=\"Two thousand years of philosophy on the margin\"><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>A little less than two years ago I began to read Anthony Kenny&rsquo;s A New History of Western Philosophy. It&rsquo;s a big book, on the order of ~1000 pages. But that&rsquo;s not the reason I&rsquo;m just now finishing it. The book is divided by chronologically and thematically. I read about the ancients in about a [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2740,152],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-100465","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophical","category-philosophy"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100465","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=100465"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100465\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":100466,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/100465\/revisions\/100466"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=100465"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=100465"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.razib.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=100465"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}