The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the Greater Philosophers

“The Enlightenment” refers to a period in Western philosophy and culture roughly covering the 17th and 18th centuries. In Durant’s book, Voltaire is the embodiment of the main ideals of this movement. Emerging out of a period of vicious religious warfare, the Enlightenment shifted focus from worship of God to celebration of the human person, particularly beauty and reason. It used these ideas to challenge traditional forms of authority, especially aristocratic and ecclesiastical hierarchies, and would help pave the way for modern democratic concepts of every person holding the potential for wisdom and the right to civic participation.

Identified by Durant as one of the main pursuits of philosophic inquiry, “metaphysics” refers to the study of forces underlying reality itself, which no amount of sensory perception or experimentation can uncover. It is therefore a realm of almost purely abstract inquiry and a rich field for philosophic debate. One of the many interesting debates surrounding metaphysics is whether reality itself points toward the nature of that more fundamental reality, or whether human consciousness is so limited that it must imagine something utterly unlike what it knows in everyday life.

Called by Durant and others as a distinctly American philosophy, “pragmatism” was a school of philosophy that originated with William James in the late 19th century. Whereas philosophy in general is seen as the pursuit of truth, James and others declared that truth was an inherently unknowable concept, and therefore had to be considered relative. The best way to determine if something was true was to determine its value for individuals, societies, and humanity at large. Pragmatism judges the accuracy of an idea, as well as its morality, by its consequences rather than an objective correctness—although a form of this idea can be traced back to Machiavelli, indicating that James’s philosophy is not entirely American in origin.