Do you think philosophy existed prior to civilisation?

And you think so because?

you have no way to categorise thinking in the way language does without a philosophy: ontology, an idea of time, a system for organising sounds and grouping them together when they refer to similar ideas, an idea of what makes ideas similar, causality

POLIS NOT THE COPS!!!

>He thinks words express "ideas" in your mind.
Nice anti-diiluvian philosophy of language you have there.

nothing of what i said implies that

Why are their no caveman philosophers ?

No. If you're busy surviving you don't have time to think about the big questions of life. No use wondering about the why if you're worried about the how. Cavemen got mammoths to kill.

I think that many philosophical concepts were thought of over and over again by men throughout the course of our specie's existence but lacked the social framework to transmit themselves beyond a few word-of-mouth generations.

I think there were philosophical individuals ever since, and perhaps before Prometheus bestowed "higher" intellect in the human form. It's impossible to say exactly what these individuals thought, but assuming post-Promethean humans shared the same mental capacities with modern humans, then we can safely assume that the ones who had a moment to think ultimately would come to similar conclusions as we do. The mind is fundamentally limited, and as they say, there is nothing new under the sun. Now, pre-Promethean thought would be either unintelligible, uncommunicalable, or not that different than what we have now. It's not really possible to say without access to such people.
As for hunter-gatherers and similar pre-sedentary societies, I do think they engaged in philosophy. It isn't really reasonable to imagine they achieved the same layer depth we have now thanks to writing, but certain individuals were probably able to work through issues and come to modern conclusions. These were probably conveyed in early-psuedo-religious teachings

I think you underestimate the amount of down time in caveman life. Hunting was probably not a 16hr/day job..
Saw a doc about amazonian tribes once. It was mentioned that the tribespeople only did something like 4 hours of real work each day. Lots of leisure and time to think about stuff

To say that philosophy is only about the meaning of life and such questions is kiddie tier understanding of it. Philosophy began as the first organized attempt to explain the world in the broadest and most fundamental sense (metaphysics), but also to analyze and establish the preconditions for how that knowledge is gained and articulated. For instance by the study of logic, the truth conditions of statements, or by developing theories of knowledge itself.

Prehistorical peoples didn't have enough information, especially without written media, to develop the critical capacities for philosophy. they surely did wonder and attempt to develop an understanding of what the things in their living environment were and how they changed.

Most of this manifested on the religious plane, which in the earliest periods consisted of animistic religions which imbues events with personified agencies. Even religions are attempts at representing explanatory information, but they are not comparable to philosophies because they do not rationally establish their premises before assuming them.

While prehistoric people may have had rationality it might have been in a much more diminished state than a modestly well educated civilized adult of even early civilizations. The advent of written symbolisms greatly bootstrapped and enhanced people's ability to conceptualize and reason about entities that might exist beyond the immediate senses.

>Philosophy began as the first organized attempt to explain the world in the broadest and most fundamental sense (metaphysics), but also to analyze and establish the preconditions for how that knowledge is gained and articulated. For instance by the study of logic, the truth conditions of statements, or by developing theories of knowledge itself.
This isn't that important. Any child can understand (statement, evidence, conclusion) and why a lack of evidence makes something false. I know it goes a lot deeper into that, what is I, is truth real, etc. I have no interest in diving that deep, it's abstraction for abstractions sake and despite making logical sense it's just worthless word salad that doesn't help anyone concerned with tangible knowledge that's helpful or informative in real world ways.
>To say that philosophy is only about the meaning of life and such questions is kiddie tier understanding of it.
And now you know why I phrased it like I did.

Of course he did, that's why he drew cave paintings.

This is a really dumb post, it's eating meat that gave us time to kill and develop culture rather than having to spend all day collecting and crushing food like we did before.

We don't teach people shit these days.

I think so.
Man cannot stop wondering, for only He who is content with life at all times doesn't have time to wonder and man is far from that.

In whatever state he might be in.

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>and man is far from that.
*Modern man

There's no reason to believe hunter gatherers weren't content for tens of thousands of years.

t. Analytic ""''Philosopher""''

Aka sophist

>it's just worthless word salad
That's bad philosophy. Good philosophy is not castle in the clouds stuff. You know it when you see it. Many branches of knowledge first developed from philosophy. It' not just the unsystematic making up of plausible sounding stories.

I'm not going to say philosophy is as important as the practical arts or sciences but it's excellent for developing your critical thinking skills in a domain-general way which is clearly useful.

>Prehistorical peoples didn't have enough information

You think you need 'info' to be a philosopher lmao

Life has always been rough, even more so then.
Why do you think religions spread so quickly ?

>Why do you think religions spread so quickly ?
They only spread quickly when civilisation happened. Religion is a cope for the misery that accompanies abandoning nature.

or a metaphysical truth? idiot

>or a metaphysical truth?
AHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA WHAT A FUCKING RETARD OPINION

>"What is animism ?"

Yes, but it wasn't codified and much of the investigation was carried out through the inherited machinery of myth and ritual.

Man today and man 40,000 year ago are both the behaviourally modern homo-sapiens, there's little to no difference in how their brains work.

But their environment changed drastically in the last 200 years and their way of life changed drastically in the past 15,000 years

They weren't content because they knew they were going to die. This is called the human condition.

>They weren't content because they knew they were going to die
They weren't worried if they died.

They were at peace with themselves and the world around them. They didn't WANT to die but they didn't fear it like we do, they didn't toss and turn at night searching for meaning.

>This is called the human condition
That's the biggest lie ever sold.

The human condition isn't real, it's a disease created by civilisation.

Lol you fucking idiot. Nobody has ever been content to die. It's the awareness of the inevitability of death that drives culture and higher thought than eat and fuck.

Why would they start buring corpses, doing sacrifices and waste time on artistic representations ?

It's a disease created by 23 genes replicated only in humans.

A statement can be fallacious because of fallacious reasoning, unrelated to evidence behind it.
>abstraction for abstraction sake
No it isn't. There are things tangible knowledge, no matter how great, are incapable of providing. Tangible knowledge itself cannot be processed without a mind organizing it in a way that for our understanding.
I don't mean to be the usual Yea Forums contrarian retard, but it seems to me you haven't studied philosophy in any formal or regular sense, because you don't see how this is simply the traditional debate between Rationalism and Empiricism. This isn't /his/. I think a reasonable knowledge of philosophy is a precedent for arguing it.

No it did not, philosophy started in ancient Greece. Grug pondering one day why sky father sends rain is not philosophy.

I have to explain this point multiple times before mongs understand it. But to keep it simple, it comes to this. Philosophy is tied to language and the explication of a certain language. Philosophy is the language about being, the modalities of being, how is the world constituted in being etc. Philosophy doesn't only come about because it is the absence of myth (though that plays a part as well), but also because it grounds concepts to what is real and actual.

Because he can think

LIT.

Literature

Wasn’t there that one Scythian philosopher that the early Greek philosophers talked with? Or would that not could since Scythians might have had some established “civilization” at that time?