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Philosophy Then

Divided Opinions

Peter Adamson looks at how we carve up philosophies.

I’ve been thinking a lot recently about how we (Westerners) divide up philosophy. Usually we do it chronologically, and typically into three periods before the modern era: ancient, medieval, and early modern. This is obviously pretty clumsy, and unequal to boot, given that ancient and medieval between them cover more than two millennia, while ‘early modern’ typically covers only about two centuries (the seventeenth and eighteenth). A more refined periodization might define such eras as the ‘late antique’ and ‘Renaissance’, somehow fit in the nineteenth century, and so on. But one will always be stuck with blurry edges.

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