An earlier version of this article was published in October 2018.
Schopenhauer said that the empirical world Meaningless and purpose. Something that Nietzsche and later Heidegger would expand: only our will drives us in this meaningless and suffering world. Sartre went one step further to deny the greatest: if there is no meaning, there is no God, and therefore we are free to create our own values; in this way, and contrary to what other thinkers had deduced, existence precedes essence: by determining our values we are creating ourselves.
Camus would agree with him: OK, we can’t find meaning in life, but the analysis of the history of the rebellions shows that human nature does exist and influences our world.
Not that I’m showing off my knowledge. In fact I have limited myself to translating and reading one page, but one in which we can lose ourselves almost in the entirety of the history of Western thought. Deniz Cem Önduygu, an art graduate and a philosophy fan, has organized a giant thinking tool that can be used to travel for 2,600 years of the history of philosophy.
There are a hundred essential authors, arranged chronologically, with their great ideas indexed. And most importantly: with a system of interactive connections that serves to see how the ideas of each philosopher are connected or refuted over the years. Many of the contributions are linked to the origin of the quote, so you can also consult the bibliography that Önduygu has used. As a modest student, the young man also reminds him that he is not an expert, and asks readers to let him know if they see any inaccuracies in the philosophical statements so that he can correct it properly.
But it doesn’t seem like this is going to be the case. His work is so exhaustive that it seems that everything would be correct. It is a tool that any student and teacher should know and recommend, consult it when necessary as a source. It is easy for a teacher to summarize us Kant’s principles in 18 essential points, but it is no longer so to expand this thought before and after in time to see how ideas dialogue with each other throughout history.
Let’s take one of the most popular hypotheses in the history of knowledge: for Plato, our goal in life should be to penetrate hidden thought in reality. Go beyond the shadows that are projected to us in the cavern. Aristotle contradicted his teacher: it is useless to “philosophize” if we move away from concrete experience.
Saint Augustine and Saint Thomas Aquinas focused on sensory experience: while true knowledge only knows of a timeless and immaterial world (as, for example, mathematics), our senses lead us to illusion, and to our misfortune the Rational knowledge is acquired through sight, hearing, and so on. Kant would express this paradox in another way: we are unable to access to the kingdom of things as they are. Our senses will always influence our way of perceiving matter.
In short, it is an interactive map in which to spend hours and hours watching the rhymes that the most prepared men of each time have created over the centuries about the great questions of humanity. As its creator warns, it will be much better that you use a browser to immerse yourself in its infinite page. A link to save in favorites and to consult whenever we need it.