History of human thought
The first identified cultures are from the Upper Paleolithic era, evidenced by regional patterns in artefacts such as cave art, Venus figurines, and stone tools.
The thoughts and ideas discussed and refined during this period have profoundly influenced lifestyles and social consciousness up to the present day in East Asian countries.
The intellectual society of this era was characterized by itinerant scholars, who were often employed by various state rulers as advisers on the methods of government, war, and diplomacy.
The Book of Han lists ten major schools, they are: Other groups included: The earliest Greek philosophers, known as the pre-Socratics, were primarily concerned with cosmology, ontology, and mathematics.
[54] The Śramaṇa movement gave rise to diverse range of heterodox beliefs, ranging from accepting or denying the concept of soul, atomism, antinomian ethics, materialism, atheism, agnosticism, fatalism to free will, idealization of extreme asceticism to that of family life, strict ahimsa (non-violence) and vegetarianism to permissibility of violence and meat-eating.
[73][74] Various mechanisms for such a transmission of knowledge have been conjectured including Pythagoras traveling as far as India; Indian philosophers visiting Athens and meeting Socrates; Plato encountering the ideas when in exile in Syracuse; or, intermediated through Persia.
[93] Beyond their efforts to write better Latin, to copy and preserve patristic and classical texts and to develop a more legible, classicizing script, the Carolingian minuscule that Renaissance humanists took to be Roman and employed as humanist minuscule, from which has developed early modern Italic script, the secular and ecclesiastical leaders of the Carolingian Renaissance for the first time in centuries applied rational ideas to social issues, providing a common language and writing style that allowed for communication across most of Europe.
Alcuin led this effort and was responsible for the writing of textbooks, creation of word lists, and establishing the trivium and quadrivium as the basis for education.
The Ottonian Renaissance began after Otto's marriage to Adelaide (951) united the kingdoms of Italy and Germany and thus brought the West closer to Byzantium.
[97] The Ottonian Renaissance is recognized especially in the arts and architecture, invigorated by renewed contact with Constantinople, in some revived cathedral schools, such as that of Bruno of Cologne, in the production of illuminated manuscripts from a handful of elite scriptoria, such as Quedlinburg, founded by Otto in 936, and in political ideology.
The Imperial court became the center of religious and spiritual life, led by the example of women of the royal family: Matilda the literate mother of Otto I, or his sister Gerberga of Saxony, or his consort Adelaide, or Empress Theophanu.
The development of medieval universities allowed them to aid materially in the translation and propagation of these texts and started a new infrastructure which was needed for scientific communities.
Those who practiced the scholastic method believed in empiricism and supporting Roman Catholic doctrines through secular study, reason, and logic.
During the high medieval period, the Islamic world was at its cultural peak, supplying information and ideas to Europe, via Al-Andalus, Sicily and the Crusader kingdoms in the Levant.
The religion of Islam founded by Muhammad in 7th century Arabia incorporated ideas from Zoroastrianism, Judaism, and Christianity, specifically monotheism, Last Judgment, Heaven and Hell.
[102] The doctrine of Islam is based on five pillars: Shahada, faith; Salat, prayer; Zakat, alms-giving; Sawm, fasting; and Hajj, pilgrimage.
[132][133] The intellectual basis of the Renaissance was its version of humanism, derived from the concept of Roman Humanitas and the rediscovery of classical Greek philosophy, such as that of Protagoras, who said that "Man is the measure of all things."
As a cultural movement, the Renaissance encompassed innovative flowering of Latin and vernacular literatures, beginning with the 14th-century resurgence of learning based on classical sources, which contemporaries credited to Petrarch; the development of linear perspective and other techniques of rendering a more natural reality in painting; and gradual but widespread educational reform.
In politics, the Renaissance contributed to the development of the customs and conventions of diplomacy, and in science to an increased reliance on observation and inductive reasoning.
[136][137][138][139][140][141] The Scientific Revolution took place in Europe towards the end of the Renaissance period and continued through the late 18th century, influencing the intellectual social movement known as the Enlightenment.
A systematic school of philosophy in its own right for the first time in history – exerted an immense and profound influence on modern Western thought in general,[142][143] with the birth of two influential rationalistic philosophical systems of Descartes[144][145] (who spent most of his adult life and wrote all his major work in the United Provinces of the Netherlands)[146][147] and Spinoza[148][149]–namely Cartesianism[150][151][152] and Spinozism.
[166] The Enlightenment emerged from a European intellectual and scholarly movement known as Renaissance humanism and was also preceded by the Scientific Revolution and the work of Francis Bacon, among others.
[167] The Enlightenment included a range of ideas centered on the sovereignty of reason and the evidence of the senses as the primary sources of knowledge and advanced ideals such as liberty, progress, toleration, fraternity, constitutional government and separation of church and state.
[168][169] In France, the central doctrines of the Enlightenment philosophers were individual liberty and religious tolerance, in opposition to an absolute monarchy and the fixed dogmas of the Church.
The purpose of the movement was to advocate for the importance of subjectivity, imagination, and appreciation of nature in society and culture during the Age of Enlightenment and the Industrial Revolution.
With this philosophical foundation, the Romanticists elevated a number of key themes to which they were deeply committed: a reverence for nature and the supernatural, an idealization of the past as a nobler era, a fascination with the exotic and the mysterious, and a celebration of the heroic and the sublime.
[171] The modernist movement emerged during the late 19th century in response to significant changes in Western culture, including secularization and the growing influence of science.
[172] The movement rejected both 19th-century realism and Romanticism's concept of absolute originality - the idea of "creation from nothingness" - with techniques of collage,[173] reprise, incorporation, rewriting, recapitulation, revision, and parody.
Pan-Africanism is a worldwide movement that aims to encourage and strengthen bonds of solidarity between all indigenous and diaspora ethnic groups of African descent.
It questions the "grand narratives" of modernity, rejects the certainty of knowledge and stable meaning, and acknowledges the influence of ideology in maintaining political power.
