Philosophy

Stoicism

PHILOSOPHY OF MAN

• Modern philosophy
• Ancient Greek philosophy
• Contemporary Philosophy

PHILOSOPHY OF MAN

WHAT IS PHILOSOPHY?

PHILOSOPHY

• From Greek ooopia, philosophia, literally "love of wisdom"
• Is the study of general and fundamental problems concerning matters such as existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophical methods include:

• Questioning
• Critical discussion
• Rational argument
• Systematic presentation

Classic philosophical questions include:

• Is it possible to know anything and to prove it?
• What is most real?

However, philosophers might also pose more practical and concrete questions such as:

• Is there a best way to live?
• Is it better to be just or unjust (if one can get away with it)?
• Do humans have free will?

PHILOSOPHY

Historically, "philosophy" encompassed any body of knowledge. From the time of Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle to the 19th century, "natural philosophy" encompassed astronomy, medicine, and physics.

For example:

• Newton's 1687 Mathematical Principles of Natural Philosophy later became classified as a book of physics.
• In the 19th century, the growth of modern research universities led academic philosophy and other disciplines to professionalize and specialize.

PHILOSOPHY

In the modern era, some investigations that were traditionally part of philosophy became separate academic disciplines, including psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics.

PHILOSOPHY

Other investigations closely related to art, science, politics, or other pursuits remained part of philosophy.

For example:

• Is beauty objective or subjective?
• Are there many scientific methods or just one?
• Is political utopia a hopeful dream or hopeless fantasy?

PHILOSOPHY

Major sub-fields of academic philosophy include:

• Metaphysics ("concerned with the fundamental nature of reality and being")
• Epistemology (about the "nature and grounds of knowledge [and]…its limits and validity)
• Ethics
• Aesthetics
• Political philosophy
• Logic
• Philosophy of science
• History of Western philosophy

PHILOSOPHY

Since the 20th century, professional philosophers contribute to society primarily as professors, researchers, and writers. However, many of those who study philosophy in undergraduate or graduate programs contribute in the fields of law, journalism, politics, religion, science, business, and various art and entertainment activities.

PHILOSOPHY

Philosophy was traditionally divided into three major branches:

• Natural philosophy ("physics") was the study of the physical world ($physis$, lit: nature).
• Moral philosophy ("ethics") was the study of goodness, right and wrong, beauty, justice, and virtue ($ethos$, lit: custom).
• Metaphysical philosophy ("logos") was the study of existence, causation, God, logic, forms, and other abstract objects ($meta-physika$, lit: "what comes after physics").

PHILOSOPHY

This division is not obsolete but has changed. Natural philosophy has split into the various natural sciences: physics, cosmology, chemistry, astronomy, biology.

PHILOSOPHY

This division is not obsolete but has changed. Moral philosophy has birthed the social sciences: Ethics, Aesthetics, political philosophy.

PHILOSOPHY

This division is not obsolete but has changed. Metaphysical philosophy has birthed formal sciences such as logic Mathematics, philosophy of science Epistemology cosmology.

Metaphysics

Epistemology

Value theory

Logic, science and mathematics

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the study of the most general features of reality, such as:

• Existence
• Time
• Objects and their properties
• Wholes and their parts
• Events, processes, and causation
• The relationship between mind and body

Metaphysics includes

• COSMOLOGY - the study of the world in its entirety.
• ONTOLOGY - the study of being.

Metaphysics

A major point of debate revolves between:

• Realism - which holds that there are entities that exist independently of their mental perception.
• Idealism - which holds that reality is mentally constructed or otherwise immaterial.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics deals with the topic of identity.

• Essence - is the set of attributes that make an object what it fundamentally is and without which it loses its identity.
• Accident - is a property that the object has, without which the object can still retain its identity.
• Particulars - are objects that are said to exist in space and time
• Abstract objects - such as numbers
• Universals - which are properties held by multiple particulars, such as redness or a gender.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the study of knowledge (Greek episteme).

Epistemology

Epistemologists study the putative sources of knowledge, including:

• Intuition
• A priori reason
• Memory
• Perceptual knowledge
• Self-knowledge
• Testimony

Epistemologists also ask:

• What is truth?
• Is knowledge justified true belief?
• Are any beliefs justified?

Epistemology

Putative knowledge includes:

• Propositional knowledge (knowledge that something is the case).
• Know-how (knowledge of how to do something).
• Acquaintance (familiarity with someone or something).

Epistemology

Skepticism is the position which doubts claims to knowledge.

The regress argument, a fundamental problem in epistemology, occurs when, in order to completely prove any statement, its justification itself needs to be supported by another justification.

This chain can go on forever, called infinitism, it can eventually rely on basic beliefs that are left unproven, called foundationalism, or it can go in a circle so that a statement is included in its own chain of justification, called coherentism.

Epistemology

• Rationalism is the emphasis on reasoning as a source of knowledge. It is associated with a priori knowledge, which is independent of experience, such as math and logical deduction
• Empiricism is the emphasis on observational evidence via sensory experience as the source of knowledge.

Among the numerous topics within metaphysics and epistemology, broadly construed are:

• Philosophy of language explores the nature, the origins, and the use of language.
• Philosophy of mind explores the nature of the mind and its relationship to the body. It is typified by disputes between dualism and materialism. In recent years this branch has become related to cognitive science.
• Philosophy of religion explores questions that arise in connection with religions, including the soul, the afterlife, God, religious experience, analysis of religious vocabulary and texts and the relationship of religion and science.
• Philosophy of human nature - analyzes the unique characteristics of human beings, such as rationality, politics and culture
• Metaphilosophy - explores the aims of philosophy, its boundaries and its methods.

Value theory (or axiology)

Value theory (or axiology) is the major branch of philosophy that addresses topics such as goodness, beauty, and justice. Includes Ethics, aesthetics, political philosophy feminist philosophy philosophy of law.

ETHICS, OR "MORAL PHILOSOPHY"

Studies good and bad conduct
considers how to live a good life
includes Right and wrong values, good and evil
Identifying standards of morality
meta-investigations about whether a best way to live or related standards exists

ETHICS, OR "MORAL PHILOSOPHY"

The main branches of ethics are: meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics.

ETHICS, OR "MORAL PHILOSOPHY"

A major point of debate revolves around:

• Consequentialism, where actions are judged by the potential results of the act. utilitarianism such as to maximize happiness
• Deontology, where actions are judged by how they adhere to principles, irrespective of negative ends.

Aesthetics

Aesthetics is the "critical reflection on art, culture and nature. It addresses the nature of art, beauty and taste, enjoyment, emotional values, perception and with the creation and appreciation of beauty.

Aesthetics It is more precisely defined as the study of sensory or sensori- emotional values, sometimes called judgments of sentiment and taste. It divides into art theory, literary theory, film theory and music theory

Political philosophy

Political philosophy is the study of government and the relationship of individuals (or families and clans) to communities including the state. It includes questions about justice, law, property and the rights and obligations of the citizen.

Politics and ethics are traditionally linked subjects, as both discuss the question of what how people should live together

Other branches of value theory

• Philosophy of law (often called jurisprudence) explores the varying theories explaining the nature and interpretation of laws.
• Philosophy of education analyzes the definition and content of education, as well as the goals and challenges of educators.
• Feminist philosophy explores questions surrounding gender, sexuality and the body including the nature of feminism itself as a social and philosophical movement.
• Philosophy of sport analyzes sports, games and other forms of play as sociological and uniquely human activities.

Logic, science and mathematics

Many academic disciplines generated philosophical inquiry. The relationship between "X" and the 'philosophy of X" is debated.

Richard Feynman argued that the philosophy of a topic is irrelevant to its primary study, saying that "philosophy of science is as useful to scientists as ornithology is to birds."

Curtis White, by contrast, argued that philosophical tools are essential to humanities, sciences and social sciences.
The topics of philosophy of science are numbers symbols and the formal methods of reasoning as employed in the social sciences and natural sciences.

Logic, science and mathematics

Logic is the study of reasoning and argument.

An argument is "a connected series of statements intended to establish a proposition"

The connected series of statements are "premises" and the proposition is the conclusion

For example:

• All humans are mortal. (premise)
• Socrates is a human. (premise)
• Therefore, Socrates is mortal. (conclusion)

Logic, science and mathematics

Deductive reasoning is when, given certain premises, conclusions are unavoidably implied.

Rules of inference are used to infer conclusions such as, modus ponens, where given "A" and "If A then B", then "B must be concluded."

Because sound reasoning is an essential element of all sciences, social sciences and humanities disciplines, logic became a formal science.

Sub-fields include mathematical logic, philosophical logic, Modal logic, computational logic and non-classical logics A major issue in the philosophy of mathematics revolves around whether mathematical entities are objective and discovered, called mathematical realism, or invented, called mathematical antirealism.

END OF PHILOSOPHY OF MAN

Modern Philosophy

Introduction to Modern Philosophy

• Rationalism
• Empiricism
• Existentialism
• Idealism
• Political philosophy
• Phenomenology
• Pragmatism
• Analytic philosophy

Modern Philosophy

Modern philosophy is a branch of philosophy that originated in Western Europe in the 17th century and is now common worldwide. It is not a specific doctrine or school (and thus should not be confused with Modernism), although there are certain assumptions common to much of it, which helps to distinguish it from earlier philosophy

Modern Philosophy

The 17th and early 20th centuries roughly mark the beginning and the end of modern philosophy. How much if any of the Renaissance should be included is a matter for dispute; likewise, modernity may or may not have ended in the twentieth century and been replaced by postmodernity. How one decides these questions will determine the scope of one's use of "modern philosophy."

Modern Philosophy

Modern philosophy traditionally begins with René Descartes and his dictum "I think, therefore I am". In the early seventeenth century, the bulk of philosophy was dominated by Scholasticism, written by theologians and drawing upon Plato, Aristotle, and early Church writings. Descartes argued that many predominant Scholastic metaphysical doctrines were meaningless or false.

He tries to set aside as much as he possibly can of all his beliefs, to determine what if anything he knows for certain He knows what he is thinking about, even if it is not true, and he knows that he is there thinking about it. He finds that he can doubt nearly everything: the reality of physical objects, God, his memories, history, science, even mathematics, but he cannot doubt that he is, in fact, doubting. From this basis, he builds his knowledge back up again. He finds that some of the ideas he has could not have originated from him alone, but only from God; he proves that God exists. He then demonstrates that God would not allow him to be systematically deceived about everything; in essence, he vindicates ordinary methods of science and reasoning, as fallible but not false.

In short, he proposed to begin philosophy from scratch. In his most important work, Meditations on First Philosophy, he attempts just this, over six brief essays

Rationalists

• René Descartes
• Baruch Spinoza
• Gottfried Leibniz

René Descartes

• French philosopher, mathematician, and scientist.
• Dubbed the father of modern western philosophy

all Philosophy is like a tree, of which Metaphysics is the root, Physics the trunk, and all the other sciences the branches that grow out of this trunk, which are reduced to three principals, namely, Medicine, Mechanics, and Ethics.

By the science of Morals, I understand the highest and most perfect which, presupposing an entire knowledge of the other sciences, is the last degree of wisdom.

best known philosophical statement is $Cogito ergo sum$ (French: Je pense, donc je suis; I think, therefore I am)

ethics was a science, the highest and most perfect of them. Like the rest of the sciences, ethics had its roots in metaphysics. In this way he argues for the existence of God, investigates the place of man in nature, formulates the theory of mind-body dualism, and defends free will.

Baruch Spinoza

• Born Benedito de Espinosa
• Dutch philosopher of Sephardi/Portuguese origin
• Considered one of the great rationalists of 17th- century philosophy
• Argued that God exists and is abstract and impersonal. Spinoza's view of God is what Charles Hartshorne describes as Classical Pantheism
• Morality and ethical judgement like choice is predicated on an illusion. Blame" and "Praise" are non existent human ideals only fathomable in the mind because we are so acclimatized to human consciousness interlinking with our experience that we have a false ideal of choice predicated upon this.

"the infant believes that it is by free will that it seeks the breast; the angry boy believes that by free will he wishes vengeance; the timid man thinks it is with free will he seeks flight; the drunkard believes that by a free command of his mind he speaks the things which when sober he wishes he had left unsaid…. All believe that they speak by a free command of the mind, whilst, in truth, they have no power to restrain the impulse which they have to speak."

Gottfried Wilhelm (von) Leibniz

• developed differential and integral calculus independently of Isaac Newton
• German polymath and philosopher who occupies a prominent place in the history of mathematics and the history of philosophy
• French: Godefroi Guillaume Leibnitz
• Wrote works on philosophy, politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology
• Made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in philosophy, probability theory, biology, medicine, geology, psychology, linguistics, and computer science
• His philosophy also looks back to the scholastic tradition, in which conclusions are produced by applying reason to first principles or prior definitions rather than to empirical evidence.
• Anticipated modern logic and analytic philosophy along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, was one of the three great 17th-century advocates of rationalism.
• In philosophy, Leibniz is most noted for his optimism, i.e. his conclusion that our Universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one that God could have created, an idea that was often lampooned by others such as Voltaire.

Empiricism

Empiricism is a theory of knowledge which opposes other theories of knowledge, such as rationalism, idealism and historicism.

Empiricism asserts that knowledge comes (only or primarily) via sensory experience as opposed to rationalism, which asserts that knowledge comes (also) from pure thinking.

Both empiricism and rationalism are individualist theories of knowledge, whereas historicism is a social epistemology

Empiricism should not be mixed up with empirical research because different epistemologies should be considered competing views on how best to do studies, and there is near consensus among researchers that studies should be empirical

While historicism also acknowledges the role of experience, it differs from empiricism by assuming that sensory data cannot be understood without considering the historical and cultural circumstances in which observations are made. Today empiricism should therefore be understood as one among competing ideals of getting knowledge or how to do studies. As such empiricism is first and foremost characterized by the ideal to let observational data "speak for themselves", while the competing views are opposed to this ideal

Empiricism

The term empiricism should thus not just be understood in relation to how this term has been used in the history of philosophy. It should also be constructed in a way which makes it possible to distinguish empiricism among other epistemological positions in contemporary science and

In other words: Empiricism as a concept has to be constructed along with other concepts, which together make it possible to make important discriminations between different ideals underlying contemporary science. Empiricism is one of several competing views that predominate in the study of human knowledge, known as epistemology.

scholarship.

Empiricism emphasizes the role of experience and evidence, especially sensory perception, in the formation of ideas, over the notion of innate ideas or tradition[2] in contrast to, for example, rationalism which relies upon reason and can incorporate innate knowledge.

Empiricists

• John Locke
• George Berkeley
• David Hume

John Locke

• English philosopher and physician
• most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism
• considered one of the first of the British empiricists
• first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness.
• advocated governmental separation of powers and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances.
• following the tradition of Sir Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory
• postulated that, at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa
• believed that human nature allowed people to be selfish.
• In a natural state all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a natural right to defend his "Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions
• Locke's political theory was founded on social contract theory.
• He maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception
• Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant

George Berkeley

• Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others)
• known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne)
• Also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
• This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived
• Berkeley defends this thesis with a deductive proof stemming from the laws of nature. First, he establishes that because God is perfectly good, the end to which he commands humans must also be good, and that end must not benefit just one person, but the entire human race. Because these commands-or 'laws-if practiced, would lead to the general fitness of humankind, it follows that they can be discovered by the right reason-for example, the law to never resist supreme power can be derived from reason because this law is "the only thing that stands between us and total disorder".Thus, these laws can be called the laws of nature, because they are derived from God-the creator of nature himself. "These laws of nature include duties never to resist the supreme power, lie under oath…or do evil so that good may come of it."
• In A Discourse on Passive Obedience, Berkeley defends the thesis that people have "a moral duty to observe the negative precepts (prohibitions) of the law, including the duty not to resist the execution of punishment. The tract A Discource on Passive Obedience (1712) is "Berkeley's main contribution to moral and political philosophy."
• make exceptions to this sweeping moral statement, stating that we need not observe precepts of "usurpers or even madmen" and that people can obey different supreme authorities if there are more than one claims to the highest authority

David Hume

• Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, (born David Home)
• best known today for his highly influential system of radical philosophical empiricism skepticism, and naturalism.
• Moral decisions are grounded in moral sentiment." It is not knowing that governs ethical actions, but feelings.(89) Arguing that reason cannot be behind morality, he wrote: Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason
• "a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will"
• argue that the mind itself, far from being an independent power, is simply 'a bundle of perceptions' without unity or cohesive quality."
• The self is nothing but a bundle of experiences linked by the relations of causation and resemblance; or, more accurately, that the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle.
• Not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self. That is, rather than reducing the self to a bundle of perceptions, Hume is rejecting the idea of the self altogether. On this interpretation, Hume is proposing a "no-self theory" and thus has much in common with Buddhist thought.
• Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

Politics

Political philosophy is the study of such topics as:

• Liberty
• Law
• Justice
• Property
• Rights
• Enforcement of a legal code by authority
• What duties citizens owe to a legitimate government, if any, and when it may be legitimately overthrown-if ever.
• What it is, what form it should take, and why
• What rights and freedoms it should protect and why

Political philosophers

• Thomas Hobbes
• John Locke
• Montesquieu
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau
• Karl Marx
• Friedrich Engels
• John Stuart Mill
• Jeremy Bentham
• James Mill

Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury

• English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy
• one of the founders of modern political philosophy and political science
• his 1651 book Leviathan established social contract theory, the foundation of most later Western political philosophy
• Hobbes also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought:
• the right of the individual;
• the natural equality of all men
• the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state);
• the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.

of John Locke

• English philosopher and physician
• most influential of Enlightenment thinkers and commonly known as the "Father of Liberalism
• Considered one of the first of the British empiricists
• His work greatly affected the development of epistemology and political philosophy
• advocated governmental separation of powers and believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances.
• In a natural state all people were equal and independent, and everyone had a natural right to defend his "Life, health, Liberty, or Possessions
• he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception
• Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant

Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brède et de Montesquieu

• French lawyer, man of letters, and political philosopher who lived during the Age of Enlightenment
• He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, which is implemented in many constitutions throughout the world.
• He is also known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism in the political lexicon

Jean-Jacques Rousseau

• you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody."
• looked to a hypothetical State of Nature as a normative guide.
• By joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free.
• The first man who, having fenced in a piece of land, said 'This is mine' "Beware of listening to this impostor"
• uncorrupted morals" prevail in the "state of nature"
• "Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man".

Karl Marx

• philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist
• his ideas gave birth to Marxism *called "the first great user of critical method in social sciences"
• criticised speculative philosophy, equating metaphysics with ideology *argued man is a corporeal actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities
• The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.

Friedrich Engels

*German philosopher
*social scientist, journalist, businessman *co-founded Marxist theory with Karl Marx

John Stuart Mill

• English philosopher, political economist and civil servant.
• most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism
• "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century."
• a proponent of utilitarianism, contributed widely to social theory, political theory and political economy
• contributed significantly to the theory of the scientific method
• first Member of Parliament to call for women's suffrage
• believed that "equality of taxation" meant "equality of sacrifice"

Jeremy Bentham

• English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer
• regarded as the founder of modern utilitarianism
• fined as the fundamental axiom of his philosophy the principle that it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong
• a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism
• advocated individual and economic freedom, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts
• called for the abolition of slavery, the abolition of the death penalty, and the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children
• come known in recent years as an early advocate of animal rights
• in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them "nonsense upon stilts"

James Mill

• British historian economist, political theorist, and philosopher.
• (born James Milne)
• His influential History of British India contains a complete denunciation and rejection of Indian culture and civilisation.
• is counted among the founders of Ricardian school and was the father of John Stuart Mill, the philosopher of liberalism
• He divided Indian history into three parts: Hindu, Muslim and British.

Idealism

Idealism refers to the group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally a construct of the mind or otherwise immaterial.

Epistemologically, idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing.

In a sociological sense, idealism emphasizes how human ideas-especially beliefs and values-shape society

As an ontological doctrine, idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit.

Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind. An extreme version of this idealism can exist in the philosophical notion of solipsism

Idealist philosophers

• Immanuel Kant
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte
• Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
• Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Francis Herbert Bradley

Immanuel Kant

• German philosopher who is considered the central figure of modern philosophy
• Kant argued that the human mind creates the structure of human experience, that reason is the source of morality, that aesthetics arises from a faculty of disinterested judgment, that space and time are forms of our sensibility, and that the world as it is "in-itself" is unknowable
• beliefs continue to have a major influence on contemporary philosophy, especially the fields of metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, political theory, and aesthetics

Idea of freedom

• "everything that is possible through freedom"
• Categories of freedom (i) to be free, (ii) to be understood as free, and (iii) to be morally evaluated
• In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment," and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical

Johann Gottlieb Fichte

• German philosopher
• became a founding figure of the philosophical movement known as German idealism
• motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness
• also the originator of thesis-antithesis-synthesis (Thesis- Antithesis- Synthesis), an idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel
• has a reputation as one of the fathers of German nationalism

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling

• German philosopher
• Standard histories of philosophy make him the midpoint in the development of German idealism
• Naturphilosophie is to exhibit the ideal as springing from the real.
• The change which experience brings before us leads to the conception of duality, the polar opposition through which nature expresses itself.
• The dynamical series of stages in nature are matter, as the equilibrium of the fundamental expansive and contractive forces, light, with its subordinate processes (magnetism, electricity, and chemical action); organism, with its component phases of reproduction, irritability and sensibility.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling quotations

• "Nature is visible Spirit; Spirit is invisible Nature." (Ideen, "Introduction")
• "History as a whole is a progressive, gradually self-disclosing revelation of the Absolute." (System of Transcendental Idealism, 1800)
• "Has creation a final goal? And if so, why was it not reached at once? Why was the consummation not realized from the beginning? To these questions, there is but one answer: Because God is Life, and not merely Being.'"
• 'Once he who has tasted freedom can feel the desire to make over everything in its image, to spread it throughout the whole universe."