Philosophy Final

Exam Content Summary

Late Modern Philosophy

G.W.F. Hegel – After Kant, the most influential German philosopher of the 19^th century. His most influential work is probably his Phenomenology of Spirit (Mind). He proposed that natural history & even thought itself evolved as a function of ‘Absolute Reason’. Reality, thus, could be described in terms of a structural ‘dialectic’. Hegel’s tripartite dialectic was composed of a thesis, an anti-thesis, & then a synthesis, in response to Kant’s attempt to establish limits for reason. Conflict, Hegel argued, drives progress. One of the examples he used was ‘lordship & bondage’ such that the master’s identity is defined by slave ownership, resulting in dependency, power thus shifting from one to the other, but a transformation of both leading to a ‘higher’ form of social relations, i.e., mutual respect.

Arthur Schopenhauer – Born into a wealthy German family, Schopenhauer received a fine education & traveled in the East. He formulated the view that the Kantian ‘self’ was only observable in terms of manifestation of one’s own will. In The World as Will & Representation, he argued that the hierarchy of existence did not culminate in God, leading him to adopt a form of nihilism such that the universe was regarding as meaningless apart from what each individual decided was meaningful for themselves.

Søren Kierkegaard – Danish philosopher, widely regarded as the ‘Father’ of Existentialism. He was broadly anti-Hegelian to the extent that he was concerned for the redemption of individuals. Ultimate truth, he argued, was subjective, not objective. He thought to turn people inward by presenting situations of conflict whose outcome would be decided only through internalizing a problem & then needing to take a ‘leap of faith’. He wrote using various pseudonyms – Johannes Climacus, Johannes de Silentio, etc., authoring such works as Either/Or, Fear & Trembling, Philosophical Fragments, & Concluding Unscientific Postscript.

Jeremy Bentham – English philosopher & legal theorist who was a key figure in the development of ‘utilitarianism’. He articulated the ‘Greatest Happiness Principle’ (society should be calibrated to maximize social benefits) based on a Lockean empiricist ‘association of ideas’. One of his most influential disciples was James Mill, father of John Stuart Mill.

John Stuart Mill – The most successful 19^th century promoter of utilitarian philosophy. A child prodigy, (educated along Benthamite principles) who made significant contributions regarding inductive logic &, in his The Subjection of Women, argued for social equal treatment regardless of gender. He was devoted to his wife Harriet Taylor whom, he said, had the ‘most profound mind’ he had ever known. His treatise on ‘Utilitarianism’ argued for a cost/benefit approach to ethics (practically implemented through rules) that favored induction (teleology) over intuition (deontology).

Friedrich Nietzsche – German philosopher & philologist (a language scholar), son & grandson of Lutheran ministers (nicknamed ‘the Little Jesus’ as a child), Nietzsche grew up to renounce becoming a minister in favor of atheism & ‘perspectivism’. He followed Schopenhauer’s views on the power of a given individual’s will such that ‘truth’ was determined by the extent to which articulate & influential Übermensch (Supermen) exercised their will to power to force lesser beings (the ‘herd’) to agree to their perspectives. In this way, Moses, Socrates, Jesus, Muhammed, Confucius, etc., were responsible for propagating the eventually widely held moral beliefs of most cultures. He espoused the ‘Death of God’ to the extent that most people actually lived from day to day as if God did not really matter. Among his many works were The Birth of Tragedy, Beyond Good & Evil, along with Thus Spoke Zarathustra.

Contemporary Philosophy

Charles S. Peirce – American philosopher & initiator of ‘pragmatism’ (although a spat with William James led to his re-naming his own views as ‘pragmaticism’). Peirce studied & taught at Harvard College & was the author of “The Fixation of Belief”. Peirce argued that people arrived at (‘fixed on’) beliefs as the result of tenacity, reliance upon authorities, by natural preference, or through the scientific method – the latter form generally being far & away the most useful in approximating ‘truth’.

William James – Like Peirce, a Harvard-graduate & a teacher there, James specialized in psychology (author of a well-regarded textbook, The Principles of Psychology) but was a noted philosopher in his own right. He adopted pragmatism to argue that ‘truth’ approximated simply to ‘what works’. In his “The Will to Believe”, James proposed that people should spend their cognitive energy focusing on living (as opposed to dead), forced (as opposed to avoidable), & momentous (as opposed to trivial) options. Decisions on religious matters should, for the most part, be confined to options that are living, forced, and momentous – such that conversion to ‘Mohammedanism’ (Islam) was not really a ‘living’ option for a late 19^th-century Bostonian, although choosing among a variety of Christian denominations was.

Ludwig Wittgenstein – Austrian mathematician/philosopher who early in his career held the logical positivist view that language & thought were tied such that language functioned as ‘pictures’ of the world reducible to logical propositions. His early Tractatus-Logico-Philosophicus articulated a ‘complete’ view of thought’s relation to language – & that about which one could not speak, one must be silent. He later revised his views, however, in the Philosophical Investigations to characterize language not in terms of ‘pictures’ but rather as forms of life or, indeed, as ‘games’, words being linked to behavior.

Edmund Husserl – Czech (Moravian) philosopher who was interested in the phenomenology of consciousness over against the subconscious. He was particularly influenced by Franz Brentano’s views on mathematical psychology. In his book Ideas: General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology, he proposed the notion of ‘bracketing’ one’s experience (epochē) thus allowing objects to manifest themselves ‘on their own terms’ rather than as subjects of ideation.

Martin Heidegger – German existentialist philosopher influenced by Husserl’s phenomenological approach to reality. Presuppositions about the world were to be ‘bracketed off’ allowing objects to manifest themselves to each individual (Dasein). He discussed the fundamental manifestation of ‘Being’ as such in his famous Being & Time. The vast majority of people, Heidegger argued, ignore (i.e., are literally ‘ignorant’) of ‘Being’ and are, in a sense, ‘broken’ or ‘fallen’ (thrown into the world), finding themselves disjointed between ‘subjective’ & ‘objective’ understandings of themselves & the world. His essay “The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics” (concerned with why the universe or ‘multiverse’ even exists) rejected the ‘demonic indifference’ to ‘Being’ of both materialistic and populist America & Russia. His voluntary association with Nazism colors contemporary regard for him although his views on deconstructing language figure greatly among some exponents of post-modern thought.

Jean-Paul Sartre – The French atheist existentialist who popularized post-modern existentialism. His plays & novels earned him the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature which he rejected. He wrote Being & Nothingness (beginning in prison) arguing that ‘existence precedes essence’ & that Being was truly only manifest in free action. Sartre appropriates Heidegger’s emphasis on living an ‘authentic life’ being ‘true to oneself’ above all. He disparaged those who lived in ‘bad faith’ conforming themselves to the views & expectations of others. He used examples drawn from his observations of the behavior of people in a Parisian café – a couple on a date, a waiter, & a seemingly closeted gay man (whom Sartre even characterized as a ‘pederast’).

Nelson Goodman – Harvard philosopher, art collector, & author of Fact, Fiction, & Forecast. Goodman used a thought experiment using unconventional language forms (terms such as ‘grue’ & ‘bleen’) to argue the impossibility of, in principle, anyone being able to establish formal inductive validity.

John Rawls – Harvard philosopher & social theorist who argued for a reclamation of social contract theory over against utilitarianism. Rawls argued, in his Theory of Justice, that slavery was permissible under utilitarian principles if it produced the greatest amount of happiness for the greatest number (i.e., a non-slave majority). Rawls held that a fair society might be designed by a free, self-interested populace from an ‘original position’ behind a ‘veil of ignorance’ as to their eventual, actual particular roles in that society.