Audiobook

History of Philosophy

Ralph Barton Perry

Philosophy is the search for a comprehensive view of nature, an attempt at a universal explanation of things. It is both the summary of the sciences and their completion; both general science and a specialty distinguished from science proper; and, like its elder sisters, religion and poetry, forms a separate branch among the manifestations of the human mind. The different sciences have special groups of facts for their subject-matter, and seek to discover the causes of these phenomena, or to formulate the laws according to which they are produced. In philosophy, on the other hand, the human mind endeavors to rise beyond such groups and their particular laws, and to explain the wrorld as a whole, or the universal fact or phenomenon , by the cause of the causes, or the first cause. In other words, it attempts to answer the question, Why does this world exist, and how does it happen to be what it is? (Summary by Introduction)