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What are the main distinctive characteristics of Western philosophy?

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    This is a huge question -- entire volumes could be written on it. Could you narrow it down a bit? Jan 14, 2015 at 17:23
  • Sure, I'm kind of new to philosophy, are there some obvious splitting points that would not make it off-topic?
    – user13335
    Jan 14, 2015 at 17:28
  • @Hosch250 if you could perhaps create a cut-off in time? For instance, Western Philosophy changed directions, which complicates the question. Also, Eastern thought includes Buddhism, Taoism, Confucianism and if you're willing to isolate philosophical concerns from it, Hinduism/Yoga.
    – R. Barzell
    Jan 14, 2015 at 17:32
  • Have you checked wikipedia and Stanford Encyclopedia yet? What did they say that you didn't understand?
    – Lukas
    Jan 14, 2015 at 17:42
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    @virmaior I have a college paper coming up that asks for distinctive characteristics of western thinking. My approach is to find different characteristics of both eastern and western thinking, but almost everything I find on the web contradicts itself in another place. I would like some pointers on what is generally accepted by professional philosophers as being distinctive to each society, and I can take it from there.
    – user13335
    Jan 14, 2015 at 23:15

3 Answers 3

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This topic is monumentally too big, but given your comment about why you are asking it, I can at least give you one direction to look in.

I have found Western philosophy to be dominated by dualism, the idea that there is a physical realm with natural rules, and consciousness as a separate "special" thing that most agree exists but few agree on what it is.

  • Pure physical philosophy seems to have to spend a tremendous amount of time arguing how it can generate effects which are similar to dualist consciousnesses.
  • Pure conscious philosophy is rare, but has to spend a tremendous amount of time arguing about why the universe is so surprisingly consistent.
  • Much debate between "morals" and "natural law," and a general sense of frustration that the two just don't seem to be the same thing.
  • A general pattern that "the afterlife" seems to be disconnected from the physical realm, but the conscious persists. (If a philosopher believes in the afterlife, of course)

I find much of this dualism comes from the march of science, explaining more and more of our world with physical explanations, but always coming up shy of explaining "everything" for most people.

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  • You mean the classic mind/body problem?
    – user13335
    Jan 15, 2015 at 4:25
  • Yes, that one =)
    – Cort Ammon
    Jan 15, 2015 at 4:29
  • Good answer. The analysis of consciousness is very little dealt with in Western philosophy. In the Upanishads the analysis of consciousness is a key element of the whole philosophy. It is the only one to divide consciousness between the 4 states of waking, dream, dreamless, and turiya (4th state) or super-consciousness, and do an analysis of each state. Jan 15, 2015 at 5:41
  • @CortAmmon Good answer, duality/non-duality would have been my choice on where to draw the line in general. Could you flesh out your answer to include a little on the Eastern view of non-duality?
    – R. Barzell
    Jan 15, 2015 at 14:01
  • @R.Barzell I can, but I skipped it because the OP narrowed his topic from Eastern/Western thinking to simply Western thinking
    – Cort Ammon
    Jan 15, 2015 at 15:25
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Argumentative Philosophical Writing

Another direction that winds up being offensive or controversial if said in the wrong way is this:

Western philosophy has emphasized argumentation in a way that occurred elsewhere in a much more limited way.

By that I don't mean

(a) people in other traditions don't argue nor that non-argumentative texts don't also have points or things we can reconstruct into arguments. Along the same lines, I'm not saying they never argue to a point.

OR

(b) everything in the West is and/or has been argued well or argued coherently

What I mean is that we get a strong shift in literary mode in the West starting with Plato and then much more so in Aristotle that moves away from other forms of writing to something distinctly philosophical. The same thing does not happen in China for another thousand years. Japan too is not much prone to this until the arrival of Buddhism (I cannot speak for Indian philosophy).

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  • i agree with this, there is less reliance in the reliability of the speaker.
    – user6917
    Jan 15, 2015 at 7:39
  • Further, when we find Eastern arguments, they're often used to transcend the argumentative ground rather than proving a point per se. For instance, see the Tetralemma and the four fold negation (en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tetralemma)
    – R. Barzell
    Jan 15, 2015 at 14:03
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Non-religious metaphysics

This may not be the best way to title it, but we also see non-religious metaphysics earlier in the West.

Meaning if we look at what Aristotle and Plato are doing, they do a ton of metaphysics not founded in their culture's religion. And we see that continue in the Hellenistic period and keep going.

Confucius, Laozi, Mencius, Zhuangzi have implicit metaphysics and some of it is not especially religious, but no one is arguing about the nature of being in quite so explicit terms in the East. To get that we need to wait for the I-Ching to be taken as a foundational work and integrated into these thought-streams as philosophy. (i.e., the advent of 理 li -- not to be confused with 禮 li).