A Treasury of Philosophy [Volume 2]

Description

Man is a meditative creature, and wherever we come across his traces we find indications of his perennially philosophical mind. What philosophy he has been defined a great many times. None of the definitions, however, seems to be entirely satisfactory, and even now, standing at the end of this book —like all prefaces, this is being written, not at the beginning, but at the completion of a work — I can say only that “philosophy is the search for the indefinable.” Of the almost four hundred searchers represented in this collection, none has really set out to solve an issue or a problem once and for all, as do mathematicians, physicists, chemists, or engineers. Rather, all these men whom I have brought together under the roof of this volume have, at certain times in their lives, sat down to meditate upon the wondrous themata that came to their minds in uncharted realms: the essence of being, the nature of man, the principles of ethics, the “where from” of existence, the “where to” of human purpose, the “where in” of beauty, the undercurrents of emotional life, the structure of reason, the limitations of knowledge, and the quest for God. There are about ten thousand men and a score of women who have some claim to be classed as philosophers. If there was any notable difficulty in my task, I would point only to the process of selecting the few hundred from the many thousands. Many, even of the well-known, were not thinkers but rather teachers, others were not pundits but rather preachers—and some were just clever. I have taken care to include in this anthology a considerable number of Hebrew, Chinese, and other Oriental minds who have generally been ignored by our Western-focussed historians. I have also listed American philosophers who still seem to be step-children in the house of European lexicographers. In going through European reference books, I sometimes felt that their authors had not heard of the discovery of America!