Cross-cultural studies usually involve applying measures derived from Western cultural traditions and comparing results from different nations within a priori Western theoretical frameworks. There is a dan- ger, therefore, of twisting non-Western cultures to create psychological equivalence. The word happiness did not appear in the Chinese lan- guage until recently. Fu, or fu-qi, is perhaps the closest equivalent of happiness in Chinese ancient writings. However, its definition, which is extremely vague, usually means ―anything positive and good in life.‖ Wu pointed out that longevity, prosperity, health, peace, virtue, and a comfortable death are among the best values in life. Thus, according to folklore, Chinese people‘s conception of happiness roughly includes material abundance, physical health, a virtuous and peaceful life, and relief of anxiety about death. In the Book of Change, one of the oldest and most influential philosophical works in China, everything from the cosmos to human life is viewed as a neverending and cyclic process of change – between good and bad, happiness and misery, well-being and ill-being. According to the ancient Yin – Yang theory, the universe con- sists of two basic opposing principles or natures, Yin and Yang. The change of relationships between those two forces formed all creations, which are still constantly changing. The ultimate aspiration of the Chi- nese conception of well-being is a state of homeostasis in nature, human societies, and individual human beings, brought about by the harmoni- ous relationships between Yin and Yang.

The ancient Chinese thinking of Taoism echoed such a philosophy of submission to, rather than control over, over the environment. Lao Tzu warned against the endless striving for material accumulation and

worldly hedonism and pointed out that good things are inevitably fol- lowed by bad things; similarly, misfortune is replaced by blessing. In- stead, he preached the natural way of life, which is simple, spontaneous, tranquil, weak, and – most important – inactive – that is, taking no ac- tion that is contrary to nature. In other words, one should let nature take its own course. However, ancient Chinese philosophy is marked by du- alism. Two systems represent the wisdom of the laboring masses and the wisdom of the educated elite. The aforementioned folk- Lu, Gilmour, & Kao 479 lore about fu, or fu-qi, exemplifies the former system, whereas the Taoism founded by Lao Tzu belongs to the latter system, which as- sumes a cultural and moral higher ground over the former. Adherents of Taoism regard goals and principles such as inactivity as ideals in human life that only a worthy few can achieve through endless introspection and self-cultivation. In contrast, ideals like fu, or fu-qi, are guidelines for the masses in everyday life. Because researchers of happiness aim to understand the subjective experiences of the general population, the wisdom of the masses and the ethics of ordinary people should be at the forefront, whereas the ethics of the elite and scholars should be regarded as background. The more worldly Confucian philosophy has teachings for both the scholars and lay people and, hence, is undoubtedly the dom- inant value system in Chinese societies. It has been the most powerful influence shaping the Chinese culture and the conceptions of Chinese people for thousands of years. Confucian philosophy presupposes that the life of each individual is only a link in that person‘s family lineage and that each individual is a continuation of his or her ancestors. One can apply the same reasoning to the person‘s offspring.

Although such teaching does not necessarily take the form of belief in reincarnation, it puts the family or clan in the center of one‘s entire life. Unlike Western cultures dominated by Christianity, Chinese culture does not proclaim the pursuit of salvation in the next life as the ultimate concern; rather, it advocates striving to expand and preserve the pros- perity and vitality of one‘s family: A person must work hard and be fru- gal to accumulate material resources, to obtain respectable social status, to suppress selfish desires, to lead a virtuous life, and to fulfill social duties. Emphasizing the importance of social interaction, Wu asserted that one can achieve Confucian-style happiness through ―knowledge, benevolence, and harmony of the group‖.

Confucian philosophy stresses the collective welfare of the family or clan (extending to society and the entire human race) more than individ-

ual welfare; it emphasizes integration and harmony among man, society, and nature. Confucianism thus provides the most comprehensive framework for understanding the Chinese conception of happiness. Yang and Cheng conceptualized the Confucian values preserved in Taiwan as four groups. Family variables include family and clan re- sponsibilities and obedience to one‘s elders. Group variables include acceptance of the hierarchical structure of society; trust in and obedi- ence to authority; and a commitment to the solidarity, harmony, and norms of the group. Job-orientation variables include education, skills, hard work, and frugality. Disposition variables include austerity, calm- ness, humility, and self-control. In a similar vein, a group of scholars developed the Chinese Value Survey, which consists of four dimensions of cultural values: social integration, human-heartedness, Confucian work dynamism, and moral discipline. These not only were akin to the Chinese culture but also proved valid in subsequent large-scale cross- cultural studies. People in non-Chinese societies also experienced those salient Chinese cultural values.

Thus, conceiving and developing such an instrument outside a West- ern cultural tradition has opened up new theoretical possibilities. At the very least, cross-cultural researchers can benefit substantially from the triangulation offered by the simultaneous use of instruments, perspec- tives, or both from different cultures. As scholars have observed, the Chinese philosophies have a theme parallel to the underlying theme in Western philosophies. The major issues of concern for Western philoso- phers are ―knowledge‖ and ―truth,‖ whereas those for Chinese philoso- phers are ―action‖ and ―practice‖. Chinese philosophy is, in fact, a prac- tical philosophy – the ―philosophy of happiness‖. Of course, happiness here does not mean narrow sensual hedonism; rather, it refers to a tran- quil state of mind achieved through harmony with other people, with society, and with nature. As implied in the foregoing review of Chinese philosophical thought, philosophers of every school have prescribed and preached paths to happiness, although they have not clearly defined happiness. In short, the way to happiness is to practice various important cultural values advocated by the philosophers, especially by Confucian philosophers; practicing those values should, then, lead to happiness in life.

Cultural values can be a major force in determining the conception of happiness and, consequently, in constricting its subjective experiences. In a qualitative study of sources of happiness among Chinese in Taiwan,

researchers found evidence of the distinctive features of the Chinese conception of happiness described earlier – in particular, harmony of interpersonal relationships, achievement at work, and contentment with life. An alternative approach to the East – West connection is to exam- ine directly the relationships between cultural values and happiness in different nations. Existing cross-cultural comparisons suggest that indi- vidualism is the only persistent correlate of SWB when other predictors are controlled. However, the measures of both cultural values and SWB were, once again, culture bound and Western; not surprisingly, there- fore, Western happiness was correlated consistently with the Western value of individualism. To counter this cultural bias, one must incorpo- rate Eastern as well as Western perspectives into cross-cultural studies.

Eastern Philosophy refers very broadly to the various philosophies of Asia. In many cases, the philosophical schools are indistinguishable from the various religions which gave rise to them. Indian Philosophy, refers to any of several traditions of philosophical thought that originat- ed in the Indian subcontinent, including Hindu philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, and Jain philosophy. It is considered by Indian thinkers to be a practical discipline, and its goal should always be to improve hu- man life.

The main Hindu orthodox schools of Indian philosophy are those codified during the medieval period of Brahmanic-Sanskritic scholasti- cism, and they take the ancient Vedas as their source and scriptural au- thority:

Samkhya is the oldest of the orthodox philosophical systems, and it postulates that everything in reality stems from purusha and prakriti . It is a dualist philosophy, although between the self and matter rather than between mind and body as in the Western dualist tradition, and libera- tion occurs with the realization that the soul and the dispositions of mat- ter are different.

The Yoga school, as expounded by Patanjali in his 2nd Century

B.C. Yoga Sutras, accepts the Samkhya psychology and metaphysics, but is more theistic, with the addition of a divine entity to Samkhya's twenty-five elements of reality. The relatively brief Yoga Sutras are di- vided into eight ashtanga, reminiscent of Buddhism's Noble Eightfold Path, the goal being to quiet one's mind and achieve kaivalya.

The Nyaya school is based on the Nyaya Sutras, written by Aksapada Gautama in the 2nd Century B.C. Its methodology is based on a system of logic that has subsequently been adopted by the majority of the Indi-

an schools, in much the same way as Aristotelian logic has influenced Western philosophy. Its followers believe that obtaining valid knowledge is the only way to gain release from suffering. Nyaya devel- oped several criteria by which the knowledge thus obtained was to be considered valid or invalid.

The Vaisheshika school was founded by Kanada in the 6th Century B.C., and it is atomist and pluralist in nature. The basis of the school's philosophy is that all objects in the physical universe are reducible to a finite number of atoms, and Brahman is regarded as the fundamental force that causes consciousness in these atoms. The Vaisheshika and Nyaya schools eventually merged because of their closely related meta- physical theories . The main objective of the Purva Mimamsa school is to interpret and establish the authority of the Vedas. It requires unques- tionable faith in the Vedas and the regular performance of the Ve- dic fire-sacrifices to sustain all the activity of the universe. Although in general the Mimamsa accept the logical and philosophical teachings of the other schools, they insist that salvation can only be attained by act- ing in accordance with the prescriptions of the Vedas. The school later shifted its views and began to teach the doctrines of Brahman and free- dom, allowing for the release or escape of the soul from its constraints through enlightened activity.

The Vedanta, or Uttara Mimamsa, school concentrates on the philo- sophical teachings of the Upanishads, rather than the Brahmanas. The Vedanta focus on meditation, self-discipline and spiritual connectivity, more than traditional ritualism. Due to the rather cryptic and poetic na- ture of the Vedanta sutras, the school separated into six sub-schools, each interpreting the texts in its own way and producing its own series of sub-commentaries: Advaita, Visishtadvaita, Dvaita, Dvaitadvaita, Shuddhadvaita and Acintya Bheda Abheda.

Carvaka is a materialistic, sceptical and atheistic school of thought. Its founder was Carvaka, author of the Barhaspatya Sutras in the final centuries B.C., although the original texts have been lost and our under- standing of them is based largely on criticism of the ideas by other schools. As early as the 5th Century, Saddanitiand Buddhaghosa con- nected the Lokayatas with the Vitandas, and the term Carvaka was first recorded in the 7th Century by the philosopher Purandara, and in the 8th Century by Kamalasila and Haribhadra. As a vital philosophical school, Carvara appears to have died out some time in the 15th Century.

Buddhism is a non-theistic system of beliefs based on the teachings of Siddhartha Gautama, an Indian prince later known as the Buddha, in the 5th Century B.C. The question of God is largely irrelevant in Bud- dhism, and it is mainly founded on the rejection of certain orthodox Hindu philosophical concepts. Buddhism advocates a Noble Eightfold Path to end suffering, and its philosophical principles are known as the Four Noble Truths (the Nature of Suffering, the Origin of Suffering, the Cessation of Suffering, and the Path Leading to the Cessation of Suffering). Buddhist philosophy deals extensively with problems in metaphysics, phenomenology, ethics and epistemology.

The central tenets of Jain philosophy were established by Mahavira in the 6th Century B.C., although Jainism as a religion is much older. A basic principle is anekantavada, the idea that reality is perceived differ- ently from different points of view, and that no single point of view is completely true. According to Jainism, only Kevalis, those who have infinite knowledge, can know the true answer, and that all others would only know a part of the answer. It stresses spiritual independence and the equality of all life, with particular emphasis on non-violence, and posits self-control as vital for attaining the realization of the soul's true nature. Jain belief emphasize the immediate consequences of one's be- haviour.

The Arthashastra, attributed to the Mauryan minister Chanakya in the 4th Century B.C., is one of the earliest Indian texts devoted to political philosophy, and it discusses ideas of statecraft and economic policy. During the Indian struggle for independence in the early 20th Century, Mahatma Gandhi popularized the philosophies of ahimsa and satyagra- ha, which were influenced by the teachings of the Hindu Bhagavad Gita, as well as Jesus, Tolstoy, Thoreau and Ruskin.

Chinese Philosophy refers to any of several schools of philosophical thought in the Chinese tradition, including Confucianism, Taoism, Le- galism, Buddhism and Mohism. It has a long history of several thousand years. In about 500 B.C., the classic period of Chinese philosophy flour- ished, and the four most influential schools were established.

During the Qin Dynasty, after the unification of China in 221 B.C., Legalism became ascendant at the expense of the Mohist and Confu- cianist schools, although the Han Dynasty adopted Taoism and later Confucianism as official doctrine. Along with the gradual parallel intro- duction of Buddhism, these two schools have remained the determining forces of Chinese thought up until the 20th Century. Neo-Confucianism

was introduced during the Song Dynasty and popularized during the Ming Dynasty.

During the Industrial and Modern Ages, Chinese philosophy also be- gan to integrate concepts of Western philosophy. Sun Yat-Sen attempted to incorporate elements of democracy, republicanism and industrialism at the beginning of the 20th century, while Mao Zedong later added Marxism and oth.The main schools of Chinese philosophy are:

This school was developed from the teachings of the sage Confucius, and collected in the Analects of Confucius. It is a system of moral, so- cial, political, and quasi-religious thought, whose influence also spread to Korea and Japan. The major Confucian concepts include ren, zheng- ming, zhong, xiao, and li. It introduced the Golden Rule, the concept of Yin and Yang, the idea of meritocracy, and of reconciling opposites in order to arrive at some middle ground combining the best of both. Con- fucianism is not necessarily regarded as a religion, allowing one to be a Taoist, Christian, Muslim, Shintoist or Buddhist and still profess Confu- cianist beliefs. Arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself was Meng Tzu.

Taoism sometimes also written Daoism, Taoism is a philosophy which later also developed into a religion. Tao literally means "path" or "way", athough it more often used as a meta-physical term that de- scribes the flow of the universe, or the force behind the natural order. The Three Jewels of the Tao are compassion, moderation, and humility. Taoist thought focuses on wu wei, spontaneity, humanism, relativism, emptiness and the strength of softness. Nature and ancestor spirits are common in popular Taoism, although typically there is also a pantheon of gods, often headed by the Jade Emperor. The most influential Taoist text is the "Tao Te Ching" written around the 6th Century B.C. by Lao Tzu, and a secondary text is the 4th Century B.C. "Zhuangzi", named after its author. The Yin and Yang symbol is important in Taoist sym- bology, as are the Eight Trigrams, and a zigzag with seven stars which represents the Big Dipper star constellation.

Legalism is a pragmatic political philosophy, whose main motto is "set clear strict laws, or deliver harsh punishment", and its essential principle is one of jurisprudence. According to Legalism, a ruler should govern his subjects accordoing to Fa, Shu and Shi. Under Li Si in the 3rd century B.C., a form of Legalism essentially became a totalitari- an ideology in China, which in part led to its subsequent decline.

Buddhism is a religion, a practical philosophy and arguably a psy- chology, focusing on the teachings of Buddha, who lived in India from the mid-6th to the early 5th Century B.C. It was introduced to China from India, probably some time during the 1st Century B.C. Chinese tradition focuses on ethics rather than metaphysics, and it developed several schools distinct from the originating Indian schools, and in the process integrated the ideas of Confucianism, Taoism and other indige- nous philosophical systems into itself. The most prominent Chinese Buddhist schools are Sanlun, Tiantai, Huayan and Chán.

Mohism was founded by Mozi It promotes universal love with the aim of mutual benefit, such that everyone must love each other equally and impartially to avoid conflict and war. Mozi was strongly against Confucian ritual, instead emphasizing pragmatic survival through farm- ing, fortification and statecraft. In some ways, his philosophy parallels Western utilitarianism. Popular during the latter part of the Zhou Dynas- ty, many Mohist texts were destroyed during the succeeding Qin Dynas- ty, and it was finally supplanted completely by Confucianism during the Han Dynasty.

Ancient philosophy of the Europe. Thales of Miletus, regarded by Aristotle as the first philosopher, held that all things arise from water. It is not because he gave a cosmogony that John Burnet calls him the "first man of science," but because he gave a naturalistic explanation of the cosmos and supported it with reasons. According to tradition, Thales was able to predict an eclipse and taught the Egyptians how to measure the height of the pyramids.

Thales inspired the Milesian school of philosophy and was followed by Anaximander, who argued that the substratum or arche could not be water or any of the classical elements but was instead something "un- limited" or "indefinite". He began from the observation that the world seems to consist of opposites, yet a thing can become its opposite. Therefore, they cannot truly be opposites but rather must both be mani- festations of some underlying unity that is neither. This underlying unity could not be any of the classical elements, since they were one extreme or another. For example, water is wet, the opposite of dry, while fire is dry. Anaximenes in turn held that the arche was air, although John Bur- net argues that by this he meant that it was a transparent mist, the ae- ther.

Xenophanes was born in Ionia, where the Milesian school was at its most powerful, and may have picked up some of the Milesians' cosmo-

logical theories as a result W]hat is known is that he argued that each of the phenomena had a natural rather than divine explanation in a manner reminiscent of Anaximander's theories and that there was only one god, the world as a whole, and that he ridiculed the anthropomorphism of the Greek religion by claiming that cattle would claim that the gods looked like cattle, horses like horses, and lions like lions, just as the Ethiopians claimed that the gods were snubnosed and black and the Thracians claimed they were pale and red-haired.

Burnet says that Xenophanes was not, however, a scientific man, with many of his "naturalistic" explanations having no further support than that they render the Homeric gods superfluous or foolish. He has been claimed as an influence on Eleatic philosophy, although that is dis- puted, and a precursor to Epicurus, a representative of a total break be- tween science and religion.

Pythagoras lived at roughly the same time that Xenophanes did and, in contrast to the latter, the school that he founded sought to reconcile religious belief and reason. Little is known about his life with any relia- bility, however, and no writings of his survive, so it is possible that he was simply a mystic whose successors introduced rationalism into Py- thagoreanism, that he was simply a rationalist whose successors are re- sponsible for the mysticism in Pythagoreanism, or that he was actually the author of the doctrine; there is no way to know for certain.

Pythagoras is said to have been a disciple of Anaximandar and to have imbibed the cosmological concerns of the Ionians, including the idea that the cosmos is constructed of spheres, the importance of the infinite, and that air or aether is the archeof everything. Pythagoreanism also incorporated ascetic ideals, emphasizing purgation, metempsycho- sis, and consequently a respect for all animal life; much was made of the correspondence between mathematics and the cosmos in a musical har- mony.

Heraclitus must have lived after Xenophanes and Pythagoras, as he condemns them along with Homer as proving that much learning cannot teach a man to think; since Parmenides refers to him in the past tense, this would place him in the 5th century BCE. Contrary to the Milesian school, who would have one stable element at the root of all, Heraclitus taught that "everything flows" or "everything is in flux," the closest el- ement to this flux being fire; he also extended the teaching that seeming opposites in fact are manifestations of a common substrate to good and evil itself.

Parmenides of Elea cast his philosophy against those who held "it is and is not the same, and all things travel in opposite directions," – pre- sumably referring to Heraclitus and those who followed him. Whereas the doctrines of the Milesian school, in suggesting that the substratum could appear in a variety of different guises, implied that everything that exists is corpuscular, Parmenides argued that the first principle of being was One, indivisible, and unchanging] Being, he argued, by definition implies eternality, while only that which is can be thought; a thing which is, moreover, cannot be more or less, and so the rarefaction and condensation of the Milesians is impossible regarding Being; lastly, as movement requires that something exist apart from the thing moving, the One or Being cannot move, since this would require that "space" both exist and not exist. While this doctrine is at odds with ordinary sen- sory experience, where things do indeed change and move, the Eleatic school followed Parmenides in denying that sense phenomena revealed the world as it actually was; instead, the only thing with Being was thought, or the question of whether something exists or not is one of whether it can be thought.

In support of this, Parmenides' pupil Zeno of Elea attempted to prove that the concept of motion was absurd and as such motion did not exist. He also attacked the subsequent development of pluralism, arguing that it was incompatible with Being. His arguments are known as Zeno's paradoxes.

The power of Parmenides' logic was such that some subsequent phi- losophers abandoned the monism of the Milesians, Xenophanes, Hera- clitus, and Parmenides, where one thing was the arche, and adopted plu- ralism, such as Empedocles and Anaxagoras. There were, they said, multiple elements which were not reducible to one another and these were set in motion by love and strife or by Mind. Agreeing with Par- menides that there is no coming into being or passing away, genesis or decay, they said that things appear to come into being and pass away because the elements out of which they are composed assemble or dis- assemble while themselves being unchanging. Leucippus also proposed an ontological pluralism with a cosmogony based on two main ele- ments: the vacuum and atoms. These, by means of their inherent move- ment, are crossing the void and creating the real material bodies. His theories were not well known by the time of Plato, however, and they were ultimately incorporated into the work of his student, Democritus.

Sophistry arose from the juxtaposition of physis and nomos. John Burnet posits its origin in the scientific progress of the previous centu- ries which suggested that Being was radically different from what was experienced by the senses and, if comprehensible at all, was not com- prehensible in terms of order; the world in which men lived, on the other hand, was one of law and order, albeit of humankind's own making. At the same time, nature was constant, while what was by law differed from one place to another and could be changed.

The first man to call himself a sophist, according to Plato, was Pro- tagoras, whom he presents as teaching that all virtue is conventional. It was Protagoras who claimed that "man is the measure of all things, of the things that are, that they are, and of the things that are not, that they are not," which Plato interprets as a radical perspectivism, where some things seem to be one way for one person and another way for another person; the conclusion being that one cannot look to nature for guidance regarding how to live one's life.

Protagoras and subsequent sophists tended to teach rhetoric as their primary vocation. Prodicus, Gorgias, Hippias, and Thrasymachus appear in various dialogues, sometimes explicitly teaching that while nature provides no ethical guidance, the guidance that the laws provide is worthless, or that nature favors those who act against the laws.

Socrates, born in Athens in the 5th century BCE, marks a watershed in ancient Greek philosophy. Athens was a center of learning, with sophists and philosophers traveling from across Greece to teach rhetoric, astronomy, cosmology, geometry, and the like. The great statesman Per- icles was closely associated with this new learning and a friend of An- axagoras, however, and his political opponents struck at him by taking advantage of a conservative reaction against the philosophers; it became a crime to investigate the things above the heavens or below the earth, subjects considered impious. Anaxagoras is said to have been charged and to have fled into exile when Socrates was about twenty years of age. There is a story that Protagoras, too, was forced to flee and that the Athenians burned his books. Socrates, however, is the only subject rec- orded as charged under this law, convicted, and sentenced to death in 399 BCE. In the version of his defense speech presented by Plato, he claims that it is the envy he arouses on account of his being a philoso- pher that will convict him.

While philosophy was an established pursuit prior to Socrates, Cice- ro credits him as "the first who brought philosophy down from the

heavens, placed it in cities, introduced it into families, and obliged it to examine into life and morals, and good and evil." By this account he would be considered the founder of political philosophy. The reasons for this turn toward political and ethical subjects remain the object of much study.

The fact that many conversations involving Socrates end without having reached a firm conclusion, or aporetically, has stimulated debate over the meaning of the Socratic method. Socrates is said to have pur- sued this probing question-and-answer style of examination on a num- ber of topics, usually attempting to arrive at a defensible and attractive definition of a virtue.

While Socrates' recorded conversations rarely provide a definite an- swer to the question under examination, several maxims or paradoxes for which he has become known recur. Socrates taught that no one de- sires what is bad, and so if anyone does something that truly is bad, it must be unwillingly or out of ignorance; consequently, all virtue is knowledge. He frequently remarks on his own ignorance. Plato presents him as distinguishing himself from the common run of mankind by the fact that, while they know nothing noble and good, they do not know that they do not know, whereas Socrates knows and acknowledges that he knows nothing noble and good.

Plato was an Athenian of the generation after Socrates. Ancient tradi- tion ascribes thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters to him, although of these only twenty-four of the dialogues are now universally recognized as authentic; most modern scholars believe that at least twenty-eight dialogues and two of the letters were in fact written by Plato, although all of the thirty-six dialogues have some defenders. A further nine dia- logues are ascribed to Plato but were considered spurious even in antiq- uity.

Plato's dialogues feature Socrates, although not always as the leader of the conversation. Along with Xenophon, Plato is the primary source of information about Socrates' life and beliefs and it is not always easy to distinguish between the two. While the Socrates presented in the dia- logues is often taken to be Plato's mouthpiece, Socrates' reputation for irony, his caginess regarding his own opinions in the dialogues, and his occasional absence from or minor role in the conversation serve to conceal Plato's doctrines. Much of what is said about his doctrines is derived from what Aristotle reports about them.

Plato's dialogues also have metaphysical themes, the most famous of which is his theory of forms. It holds that non-material abstract forms, and not the material world of change known to us through our physical senses, possess the highest and most fundamental kind of reality.

Aristotle moved to Athens from his native Stageira in 367 BCE and began to study philosophy, eventually enrolling at Plato's Academy. He left Athens approximately twenty years later to study botany and zoolo- gy, became a tutor of Alexander the Great, and ultimately returned to Athens a decade later to establish his own school: the Lyceum. At least twenty-nine of his treatises have survived, known as the corpus Aristo- telicum, and address a variety of subjects includingogic, physics, optics, metaphysics, ethics, rhetoric, politics, poetry, botany, and zoology.

Aristotle is often portrayed as disagreeing with his teacher Plato. He criticizes the regimes described in Plato's Republic and Laws, and refers to the theory of forms as "empty words and poetic metaphors." He is generally presented as giving greater weight to empirical observation and practical concerns.

Aristotle's fame was not great during the Hellenistic period, when Stoic logic was in vogue, but later peripatetic commentators popularized his work, which eventually contributed heavily to Islamic, Jewish, and medieval Christian philosophy. His influence was such that Avicenna referred to him simply as "the Master"; Maimonides, Alfarabi, Aver- roes, and Aquinas as "the Philosopher."

During the Hellenistic and Roman periods, many different schools of thought developed in the Hellenistic world and then the Greco-Roman world. There were Greeks, Romans, Egyptians, Syrians and Arabs who contributed to the development of Hellenistic philosophy. Elements of Persian philosophy and Indian philosophy also had an influence. The most notable schools of Hellenistic philosophy were:

Neoplatonism: Plotinus, Ammonius Saccas, Porphyry, Zethos, Iamblichus, Proclus, Academic Skepticism: Arcesilaus, Carneades, Cic- ero, Pyrrhonian Skepticism: Pyrrho, Sextus Empiricus, Cynicism: Antis- thenes, Diogenes of Sinope, Crates of Thebes, Stoicism: Zeno of Citi- um, Cleanthes, Chrysippus, Crates of Mallus, Panaetius, Posidonius, Seneca, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Epicureanism: Epicurus and Lucre- tius, Eclecticism: Cicero.

7.1.3. Nonclassical and postclassical philosophy

Existentialism as a philosophical movement is properly a 20th- century movement, but its major antecedents, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote long before the rise of existentialism. In the 1840s, academic philosophy in Europe, following Hegel, was almost completely divorced from the concerns of individual human life, in fa- vour of pursuing abstract metaphysical systems. Kierkegaard sought to reintroduce to philosophy, in the spirit of Socrates: subjectivity, com- mitment, faith, and passion, all of which are a part of the human condi- tion.

Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche saw the moral values of 19th-century Europe disintegrating into nihilism (Kierkegaard called it the leveling process). Nietzsche attempted to undermine traditional moral values by exposing its foundations. To that end, he distinguished between master and slave moralities, and claimed that man must turn from the meekness and humility of Europe's slave-morality.

Both philosophers are precursors to existentialism, among other ide- as, for their importance on the "great man" against the age. Kierkegaard wrote of 19th-century Europe, "Each age has its own characteristic de- pravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man." Auguste Comte, the self-professed founder of modern sociology, put forward the view that the rigorous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge. He had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astron- omy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociolo- gy", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society".

The American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century.

The twilight years of the 19th century in Britain saw the rise of Brit- ish idealism, a revival of interest in the works of Kant and Hegel. Tran- scendentalism was rooted in Immanuel Kant's transcendence and Ger- man idealism, led by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The main belief was in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physi- cal and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

Sigismund Freud; was an Austrian neurologist and the founder of psychoanalysis, a clinical method for treating psychopathology through dialogue between a patient and a psychoanalyst. Freud was born to Ga-

lician Jewish parents in the Moravian town of Freiberg, in the Austrian Empire. He qualified as a doctor of medicine in 1881 at the University of Vienna. Upon completing his habilitation in 1885, he was appointed a docent in neuropathology and became an affiliated professor in 1902. Freud lived and worked in Vienna, having set up his clinical practice there in 1886. In 1938 Freud left Austria to escape the Nazis. He died in exile in the United Kingdom in 1939.

In creating psychoanalysis, Freud developed therapeutic techniques such as the use of free association and discovered transference, estab- lishing its central role in the analytic process. Freud's redefinition of sexuality to include its infantile forms led him to formulate the Oedipus complex as the central tenet of psychoanalytical theory. His analysis of dreams as wish-fulfillments provided him with models for the clinical analysis of symptom formation and the underlying mechanisms of re- pression. On this basis Freud elaborated his theory of the unconscious and went on to develop a model of psychic structure comprising id, ego and super-ego. Freud postulated the existence of libido, an energy with which mental processes and structures are invested and which generates erotic attachments, and a death drive, the source of compulsive repeti- tion, hate, aggression and neurotic guilt. In his later work Freud devel- oped a wide-ranging interpretation and critique of religion and culture.

Though in overall decline as a diagnostic and clinical practice, psy- choanalysis remains influential within psychology, psychiatry, and psy- chotherapy, and across the humanities. As such, it continues to generate extensive and highly contested debate with regard to its therapeutic effi- cacy, its scientific status, and whether it advances or is detrimental to the feminist cause. Nonetheless, Freud's work has suffused contempo- rary Western thought and popular culture. The most influential early postmodern philosophers were Jean Baudrillard, Jean-François Lyotard, and Jacques Derrida. Michel Foucault is also often cited as an early postmodernist although he personally rejected that label. Following Nie- tzsche, Foucault argued that knowledge is produced through the opera- tions of power, and changes fundamentally in different historical peri- ods.

The writings of Lyotard were largely concerned with the role of nar- rative in human culture, and particularly how that role has changed as we have left modernity and entered a "postindustrial" or postmodern condition. He argued that modern philosophies legitimized their truth- claims not on logical or empirical grounds, but rather on the grounds of

accepted stories about knowledge and the world – comparing these with Wittgenstein's concept of language-games. He further argued that in our postmodern condition, these metanarratives no longer work to legitimize truth-claims. He suggested that in the wake of the collapse of modern metanarratives, people are developing a new "language-game" – one that does not make claims to absolute truth but rather celebrates a world of ever-changing relationships (among people and between people and the world). Derrida, the father of deconstruction, practiced philosophy as a form of textual criticism. He criticized Western philosophy as privi- leging the concept of presence and logos, as opposed to absence and markings or writings.

In America, the most famous pragmatist and self-proclaimed post- modernist was Richard Rorty. An analytic philosopher, Rorty believed that combining Willard Van Orman Quine's criticism of the analytic- synthetic distinction with Wilfrid Sellars's critique of the "Myth of the Given" allowed for an abandonment of the view of the thought or lan- guage as a mirror of a reality or external world. Further, drawing upon Donald Davidson's criticism of the dualism between conceptual scheme and empirical content, he challenges the sense of questioning whether our particular concepts are related to the world in an appropriate way, whether we can justify our ways of describing the world as compared with other ways. He argued that truth was not about getting it right or representing reality, but was part of a social practice and language was what served our purposes in a particular time; ancient languages are sometimes untranslatable into modern ones because they possess a dif- ferent vocabulary and are unuseful today. Donald Davidson is not usual- ly considered a postmodernist, although he and Rorty have both acknowledged that there are few differences between their philosophies.