Stage one: Ancient Times

    - People make up their own stories and mythologies to explain things happening

    around them

    - They transfer the uncertainty elsewhere instead of using their own reasoning - Philosophical questions cannot be escaped through easy answers

Stage two: Natural Philosophers

    - Monolists

    ； Heraclitus

    ； Parmenides

    - Empedocles

    ； Four elements system

    - Democritus

    ； Everything is composed of small and inseparable particles called atoms - Fate

    ； Ancient Greek was fatalist and believes that everything is predetermined.

Stage three: Classics Era

    - Socrates

    ； Spent his life conversing with people

    ； He asks questions to teach people to come to philosophical conclusions on

    their own

    ； He believed he did not know very much, which made him smarter than any.

    ； Believed in human reason and people can only be happy if they act

    according to their reason

    ； People would not act in a way to make themselves unhappy - Plato

    ； Everything in nature changes

    ； There is an eternal world of ideas outside of the natural world

    ； Each thing we see is an idea that exists somewhere else

    ； We cannot have true knowledge about things that change, but we can have

    knowledge of things we perceive through reason

    ； People are made of body from the natural world and soul from the world if

    ideas

    ； Women are just as capable of reasoning as men

    - Aristotle

    ； Study the changes within the nature

    ； World of ideas does not exist

    ； The ideas are a concept we develop after experiencing

    ； Nothing exists beyond our perception

    ； Everything happening in nature has a purpose

    ； He categorized nature and founded logic

    ； Women are unfinished men

Stage four: Middle Ages

    - People focus on Religion and Death

    - Indo European Culture

    ； Pantheism

    ； Sight is the most important sense

    - Semitic Culture

    ； Monotheism, the belief in one God

    ； Christianity

    ？ Spread across Indo European Cultures and incorporated those cultures

    ？ Jesus showed that one could not earn salvation but God will forgive all

    who ask for forgiveness

    - Middle Ages / Dark Ages

    ； Universities and schools were established

    ； Nation-states become established with their major cities

    ； Cultural and population decline,

    ； Feudalism set in

    ； Pope was set up as head of the Church

    ； Monarchs gain power

    ； Greek-Roman cultures split up and came back again in the Renaissance - St. Augustine

    ； Salvation came only through the Church

    - St. Aquinas

    ； Brought Aristotle into Christian religion and tried to show that reason and

    faith complement each other

Stage five: Renaissance

    - People’s attention shifts from God to humanity, with a focus on individuals

    - Cultural lives flourished

    - God was present throughout nature, pantheism returned

    - Empirical methods were used, with focus on investigation and experimentation. - Science becomes important

    - Innovations were good and bad and irreversible

Stage six: Baroque

    - Baroque

    ； People believed life was like a theater.

    ； Philosophy was characterized by conflict between idealism and materialism - Descartes

    ； Descartes decided he did not know very much.

    ； He doubted philosophical works that had been handed through the Middle

    Ages and he set out to build his own philosophical system.

    ； He concerns with certain knowledge and the mind/body relationship.

    ； Descartes doubted everything that was not certain and then realized that

    the very fact of his doubting meant he must be thinking.

    ； He decided that the existence of God is also certain, and went on to define

    the world in terms of thought and matter, which he called extension.

    ； The mind and body interact, but the goal is to get the mind to operate solely

    according to reason.

    - Spinoza

    ； Spinoza was heavily influenced by Descartes

    ； Suggested that Bible should be carefully read

    ； Suggested that all is God and God is all

    ； God controlled all through natural laws

    - Locke

    ； Divided the world into two qualities

    ？ Primary qualities can be accurately perceived

    ？ Secondary qualities vary from person to person

    ； Support division of power within government

    - Hume

    ； Greatest of the empiricists

    ； He believed that perception was made up of "impressions" and "ideas".

    ； Impressions are how we experience the world, and ideas are what we recall

    of our impressions.

    ； He pointed out that we have no unchanging ego, since what we perceive as

    ourselves is in reality a huge number of perceptions that change rapidly.

    ； Hume was an agnostic—he felt the question of God's existence was beyond

    human reason.

    ； Just because every time we have seen a stone dropped it has fallen to the

    ground does not mean that it has to do so. We simply expect it to fall

    ； We impose our idea of cause and effect on the world.

    ； We act in accord with our feelings, not our reason.

    - Berkeley

    ； Berkeley questioned even more than the other empiricists.

    ； Berkeley felt that all of our feelings and ideas can stem from our souls—just

    like when we are dreaming.

    ； Berkeley believed that we exist only in God's mind.

    ； It we don’t think about it, it doesn’t exist.

Stage seven: Enlightenment

    - Characterized by much "opposition to authority", politically as well as

    philosophically.

    - People had tremendous faith in reason.

    - They wanted the people to be enlightened.

    - They felt that we must return to a better, more natural way of living. - They felt that people had fundamental natural rights and they fought to see

    those rights upheld.

    - Kant

    ； Kant worked from the views of the empiricists and the rationalists.

    ； He believed that certain factors in our mind influence our experience of the

    world.

    ； We innately perceive everything as occurring in time and space ； Kant divides the world into things as they are in themselves and as we

    perceive them.

    ； We cannot know things as they are in themselves, but we can know how we

    perceive them.

    ； Kant felt that we cannot know the answers to certain questions because

    they lie beyond human reason. He believed that these questions are

    answerable only through faith.

    ； Kant also believed that everyone has innate moral reason,

    Stage eight: Romanticism

    - Universal Romanticism

    ； The Romantic period was characterized by a worship of the individual and

    freedom.

    ； Romantics felt that art was humanity's greatest expression of freedom. ； Schelling

    ？ Saw nature as a world spirit

    ； Hegel

    ？ Believed the world spirit was just the sum of human interactions.

    ？ He thought truth was subjective and that human reason changed each

    generation. Thoughts must be judged in their contexts and right and

    wrong change accordingly.

    ？ Human knowledge is always increasing through history, so history is

    progressive.

    ？ Language forms people, rather than vice versa.

    ？ The world spirit realizes itself in three increasing stages

    ; In the individual it is the subjective spirit

    ; In the community the objective spirit

    ; In art, religion, and philosophy it is the absolute spirit.

    - National Romanticism,

    ； Concerned with history, language, and culture of the people. ； Fairy tales and folk songs became important.

    Stage nine: Contemporary

    - Individualism and Romantic World Spirit are both right

    - Kierkegaard

    ； Kierkegaard felt that the Romantics neglect a person's responsibility for their

    own life.

    ； He was angered by people's ambivalence about religion.

    ； He founded existentialism, the philosophy that is concerned with the

    existence of each individual.

    ； He felt objective truths were useless and th at each person could only

    attempt to discern what is true for himself.

    ； Reason is not that important, since we worry about things that it cannot

    decide.

    ； Life consists of an aesthetic stage, an ethical stage, and a religious stage, and

    we must decide to move between them.

    - Marx

    ； Marx was a historical materialist.

    ； He wanted philosophy to be practical.

    ； Marx believed that economic forces caused change in society. ； He defined society in terms of material bases and a superstructure of

    culture.

    ； He pointed out that the natural resources of a society determine what the

    society will produce and what type of society it will be. ； Those who have control of the means of production determine societal

    norms, and this is usually the ruling class.

    ； Marx felt there was always conflict between two classes in society

    - Darwin

    ； Darwin became well known as a natural scientist

    ； All plants and animals had evolved from earlier forms and that this process

    occurs through natural selection.

    ； We are all part of a system of revolution

    - Freud

    ； Freud pointed out that we have unconscious drives that can affect our

    actions

    ； Freud found that people had often repressed certain events in their life in

    their unconscious.

    ； Freud felt that our minds are made up of three parts.

    ？ The id is our desire for pleasure.

    ？ The ego takes reality into account and regulates the id.

    ？ And the superego is the societal morality that regulates everything we

    do.

    ； Superego constantly comes into conflict with our desires

    ； He suggested that dreams are a way of fulfilling our wishes.

    Stage ten: Modern

    - Sartre

    ； Existentialism.

    ； Felt that existentialists have nothing but humanity to go on. ； Sartre thought that there is no general human nature but rather that we

    must create our own.

    ； He viewed our freedom as a burden, since we must assume complete

    responsibility for our actions and find our own meaning in life through the

    use of our consciousness.