3/22

Soren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)

• • Died at age 42
  • Lived entire life in copenhagen denmark (save for two trips)
  • Spent a year in berlin, bestie was Hans Christian Anderson
  • Made one trip to sweden
  • Mentally crippled by guilt instilled by his father and the faith
    • His father once uttered a blashphemous expression condemning god, and he slept with the maid of the house and was then forced to marry her because she got pregnant
    • One of 7 children
    • Father said that all his children would die before age 34, because the father had committed acts of blasphemy
      • 34 age jesus died
      • 5 of Kierkegaard’s siblings died before 34
        • Only Soren and his brother peter survived after 34, but soren died at 42
  • Never married, broke off two engagements, thought being married would get in the way of his pursuit to be a Christian
  • Inherited some wealth that allowed him to pursue his life as a writer
  • Had kyphosis
    • A condition where you have a hump on your back (hunchback)
• 3 lifestyles:
  • NOT developmental, one does not go from one to the other as they grow
    • Aesthetic
      • A lifestyle devoted to pleasure
    • Ethical
      • A life of doing one's moral duty and abiding by a set of objective moral rules and principles
    • Religious
      • A passionate, subjective choice to commit yourself to God in whatever way God requires
        • An inward transformation
        • Had a really intense dislike of people who outwardly professed their faith

Rotation of crops

• One must change up where they are planting crops, if you were to plant corn on the same plot over and over, the land would get sucked dry. To fix this, you must plant something else (clover, which is nitrogen fixing, and heals the land) to return the soil to a healthy state, helping the next years crop of corn
  • Main idea: one must switch it up (in aesthetic lifestyles)
• Boredom is the root of evil
• Idleness is not, boredom is
• Aesthetic lifestyle: much like the rotation of crops, requires one to constantly be switching. Once one hedonistic hobby is exhausted, the aesthetic lifestyle requires you to be switching from pleasure to pleasure in order to prevent boredom
• Kierkegaard is critiquing this idea
• The key is not having too much hope and being to forget at will, hopping along from one pleasurable activity to the next
• Key part of lutheran faith but also for Kierkegaard is obedience
• Abraham Story
• The difference between the ethical life and the religious life
  • Killing your child is against the moral code, yet he passes the test
  • Obedience is more important that ethics
  • Kierkegaard is using this story to say, to be religious doesn't mean holding yourself slavishly to moral principles
• Seal of approval of a correct translation of the bible from the Catholic church
  • “Imprimatur”
• Kierkegaard is sick of the Catholic’s control over religion
  • He's saying , hey, you can go to your room and have a personal conversation with the almighty. You don't always need the middle man to lead you by the hand and tell you everything you need to know about being religious
  • Emphasis on SUBJECTIVITY, PERSONAL RELATIONSHIP WITH GOD, THE INDIVIDUAL
    • FORESHADOWING OF EXISTENTIALISM
  • Radical, says the ethical lifestyle is not where you want to be as a christian
  • The ethical lifestyle is not good enough to be christian, you must have an unmediated, direct communication with god. A passionate commitment
  • Its not reason that will get you to heaven, its passion
  • Commitment to complete obedience to god
• Kierkegaard would not declare himself a christian, because you must always say “i'm becoming a christian”
  • You are always in a state of becoming
• What it does not mean to be a christian
• What it means to be a christian
  • Being in a constant state of commitment to becoming a christian through faith
  • An emotional relationship with god not an intellectual one
  • This should be done in a secluded place
• Mediated vs. unmediated relationship
  • Your life as a religious person needs to be mediated rather than unmediated
• Objective uncertainty
• Faith
  • Believing in what you don't understand
  • Not a spectator sport, most people are spectators (attending ceremonies, rituals, etc)
    • These are outward displays of faith, Kierkegaard wants you to go inward
• Leap of faith
  • In the face of objective uncertainty, passionately believe in a god that cares about you
• God
  • God cannot be identified with any particular religion. God is a person but so huge, so great, that we can neither step away from god nor comprehend god. It is impossible to know god objectively
• Truth
  • Subjective truth is on an equal footing with objective truth (the sciences), but in terms of living your life, subjective truth should be preferred, because it is fueled by passion and the inward
• Really existing
  • Wants us to really exist, finding a truth that you want to live for
  • No amount of rational truth
• The value of the Bible
  • Didnt love the miracles
  • Valued the non miraculous stories in the bible because they provide for an overwhelming sense of the magnificent, incomprehensibility of god
• Choosing god
  • Rejecting all rational and objective approaches to God
  • Recognize that God is the great unknown
  • Develop a feeling for god's awesomeness
  • In the face of objective uncertainty, make the leap of faith
• The knight of resignation
  • Someone who is outwardly religious, visibly pious, abides by all the moral rules prescribed by a religion, but are often hypocritical
• The knight of faith
  • The ideal
  • Inward, seeks god in solitude, make the leap of faith QUIETLY, and has in his or her mind becoming christian
  • In the true spirit of christianity, which is LOVE and RESPECT your NEIGHBOR
  • Places the individual or the particular above the universal
• Teleological suspension of the ethical
  • The suspension of universal ethical standards for the purpose of obeying god and thereby expressing one's faith
• Spiritual trial
  • Story of abraham and isaac
  • Every time one is called upon to assert themselves as a single individual in the face of an ethical universal
• Paradox of faith
  • Standing in absolute relation to the absolute
  • To obey god in spite of what we have been taught that god requires
  • The single of individual is higher than any universal
• The tragic hero
  • One who acts within the security of universal ethical standards, consequently you lead a tragic life
• A tragic life
  • When a person leads their entire life not realizing that their life is one of becoming
• Restraint
• Human greatness
  • Resigning oneself totally to the will of god
• The deception that god needs us
  • God can require everything from us and for no reason, because humans are unworthy servants
  • God does not need us
• The wonderful lamp
  • When rubbed, the spirit appears, that is, when a person becomes passionate and a subjective law giver, then god, like the genie, comes into existence
• Subjective
  • The highest task for every human being, willing to become subjective

3/20

• Kierkegaard
  • Primary founder of existentialism
  • Wanted “the individual” inscribed in his burial stone
  • His existential crisis
  • “In the midst of objective uncertainty, how do I become religious?”
  • Objective Uncertainty
    • Seeing the world in a mess, a moral mess, inhumaneness, dehumanization, floods, famine, earthquakes etc
      • Unable to explain objectively why they happen
      • How to have faith in an all loving all just god when unfair, unloving things happen
    • How to bridge the gap between objective uncertainty and being religious?
      • Faith
        • Personal, committed, LEAP

“Leap of faith”

• • • • • No reason
  • Rational
    • Drawing a conclusion with sufficient evidence
  • Irrational
    • Drawing a conclusion without sufficient evidence or no evidence at all
  • Nonrational
    • Acknowledging that you can't solve all the problems
    • Acknowledging that human reasoning has its limits
• Doctrine
  • A set of beliefs about god and the universe
  • The litmus test of faith
  • To be a roman catholic you MUST believe in the virgin birth of jesus
• Myth
  • A set of stories that convey a sacred meaning
• Ritual
  • Acts of public or private worship
    • Ex: attending church, visiting the cemetery for funeral rites
• Morality
  • A set of ethical principles that need to be followed
• Organization/hierarchy
  • Organization is hierarchical
    • Ex: pope, priest, congregation, etc
• Totems
  • Natural objects or animals that are believed by a particular religious group to have a particular spiritual significance
    • Emblems
    • Ex: eagle feather for specific indigenous tribes
• Metaphysics + epistemology are intertwined
• Metaphysics
  • The study of what's real
• Epistemology
  • The study of how we come to know something
• Idealism
  • Essences (categories)
  • Claiming ideas are real
    • Unchangeable - permanent
    • Immaterial
    • Eternal
  • Plato
    • Imagine walking into a cave and you see people seated in front of a screen. They are chained and their heads are forced to look at the screen and behind them are actors but they don't know it cuz they’re looking at the screen. Behind the actors is a fire. All the people chained looking at the screen are the shadows coming from behind them of the actors and the fire. Plato's like, “thats what its like for people to be in the world”. He calls those shadows “appearances”
    • If one of these people is freed from the chains, they turn around and sees, oh this isn't really real, it was projection
      • In this process this person is getting closer to reality but it's not the real world. What this freed person must do is climb up the cave and see the true sunlight and see the sun. THAT is him entering reality, the world of ideas (sun is a metaphor for the world of ideas)
      • The process of reaching reality is contemplating these ideas
    • Appearance vs. reality duality in philosophy
      • I know what appears to me, but what is real
  • Plato would not fuck with RISD, because he believes artists are “copies of copies of copies” aka 3 times removed from whats real
    • Sees artists as the actors in front of the fire
  • Idealists want a foundation that is unchangeable/permanent
  • Attraction of idealism is a Permanence. The essence of beauty is there forever. etc
  • World of Ideas
    • Beauty
    • The good
  • 2
    • Not a number, a numeral. Signs for the #2
    • Numerals ≠ numbers
    • Signs ≠ numbers
  • Essence before existence - the TWONESS of the concept of 2 precedes everything else
  • Twoness + twoness = fourness
    • Locked in to truth because they are logical
  • An objective, true world of these concepts
  • The job of the idealist is to illuminate the real world (the world of ideas)
• UNIVERSAL
  • A universal moral theory/rule/code is true for everyone everywhere
  • UNIVERSAL truths are true for everyone everywhere
• Phenomenologists
  • Sense based philosophers
  • Don't say real or not real, what's important is the life I am living
  • My experiences are unique to me, and therefore it has its reality in my consciousness
  • Refuse to get into the disputes of appearance vs reality, idealism, etc
  • Interested in the world as it appears to me
• Innate
• You are born with ideas
• Problem: why doesn't everyone think like an idealist?
  • Because you are distracted by the shadows
• Descarte
  • Cogito ergo sum
  • I think therefore I am
• Realism (materialism)
• Elements common to most western religions
  • Doctrine
  • Myth
  • Religious Experience
  • Ritual
  • Morality
  • Hierarchy
  • Totems

3/15

• Hegel (Opposition of existentialism)
  • Weltgeist
    • The world spirit
      • What makes the world rational
      • The ultimate in rationality, everything is rational
        • Ex: Gravity is a law, and it has a rational basis, and the Weltgeist (world spirit) made gravity
      • Rationalism is an epistemological theory
        • Epistemology = the study of knowledge
        • Using your reading power and your mind is the only way you can get at the truth
        • Hegel is a rational epistemologist

You can only know things through your mind

• • • • • There's another sect of epistemologists - Empiricists

They believe that you can only know things through your senses

For the empiricists, the only real things in the world are material objects

materialism

• • • • • Existentialists don't care about that. What they care about is what appears to consciousness
      • The Weltgeist brings us from one stage to another in human history
        • The weltgeist has a plan to bring human beings to more and more and more freedom but not the kind of existential freedom, the freedom of the Weltgeist, “when you are rational you are freer because you are not/don't think you are being controlled by the material world”
        • Hegel believes that no matter what the Weltgeist will have its way, human beings will always make linear progress towards more freedom.
        • The mind never thinks of a single, independent, unrelated idea

Ideas are always in context, hence everything in the world is related

Hegel term: relatedness

Why existentialists reject Hegel’s philosophy, because Hegel believes the community is primary whereas Existentialists champion the importance of the individual

• • • • • Hegel believes that humans purpose in life is not to create your own goals, but to follow the Weltgeist and encourage the expression and development of freedom world wide

The ultimate goal is to get the collective to think god's thoughts

It does not mean you think about god's thoughts, you think like god (the Weltgeist) you become ultrarational, and in that is your true and total freedom

• • • • Zeitgeist
        • The spirit of the age
        • An expression of the Weltgeist, but contextualized in your particular place in human history
      • Dialectic
        • You start with the present condition (thesis) - Colonization of South Africa
        • Antithesis - Anti Colonial Movement to undermine the thesis
  • Systematic
    • Can give you a system about how the world works. About ethics, law, politics, reality
    • A big answer that you can see appearing in all sorts of human endeavors, and i can explain it to you with logic and reasoning
  • How do things work?
    • The world operates according to a rational principle, the world is rational and I can understand it and you can understand it if you simply use your reasoning.
      • What makes the world rational?
        • The Weltgeist
  • Idealism - Metaphysics
    • The stuff of knowledge is ideas, the mind not the brain
    • Metaphysical theory
    • Believe that the only real things in the world are ideas + thoughts
  • Rationalism - Epistemology
  • Rejection of Kant
  • Dialectic
  • Relatedness
  • Suppression of the individual
  • Optimism
• Schopenhauer (Opposition of existentialism)
  • Will
  • Pessimism
• Nietzsche (Existentialist)
  • Will to Power
  • Existentialists are notoriously unsystematic, all over the place, do not care if one idea is consistent with another
  • Optimism
• Hegel and Schopenhauer have a world view, existentialists DO NOT have world views
• World View:
  • To have an explanation about how everything fundamentally operates
• Alienation
  • the state or experience of being isolated from a group or an activity to which one should belong or in which one should be involved.
• Capitalism
  • Marx
    • Homo Sapiens (man the wise)
      • Rational, intellect
    • Homo faber (the maker)
      • Marx thought that homo sapien didn’t describe the whole of man, that rationality and intellect may be parts, but the real person is homo faber (the maker)
      • Marx thought the real root of alienation was capitalism
    • Capitalistic, when you feel like nothing but a cog in the machine of a corporation, this feeling is alienation
• Political
  • Feeling that our voice is ignored, ostracized, silenced, reduced to insignificance
  • Depression because experience has shown that whatever we do or say will have little or no effect. Hence we withdraw from political life, the public arena, and live in silence. That others take you with indifference in the political process, alienates us from that process.
• Social
  • Human beings are social + we want to be social
    • Marx
  • We desire long lasting relationships with friends, relatives, and lovers
  • Each of us in our own way wants to matter to someone or some group
  • Anonymity, not being known, is psychological death
  • When we are seen as different by language, skin color, sexual preferences, gender, height, weight, values, we are, to our bones, uncomfortable. We feel rejected. All of us want to be and seek acceptance
  • If we are forcibly, not only by physical force but also the force of shame/shunning, that's a sign of being made different, erased, ghosted
  • To be and feel isolated and disconnected from others brings us to feel anguish, loneliness, and despair
  • The reason why solitary confinement in prison is a brutally effective way of breaking a person is because of this
  • Some believe that this urge to be social is so strong that group affiliation is the life-blood of human experience
• Nature
  • The world is becoming increasingly explained by science. We no longer ask about the reasons and purposes of nature, rather we see natural objects obeying natural laws
  • What is our place in such a world? In such a mechanistic world
  • If we are separated/alienated from nature we feel that we can dominate it or vanquish it
  • We are conflicted with respect to nature because we don't know where we fit in nature. For millennia we have thought to be superior to nature and from the biblical writings we have been led to believe that we have been placed on earth to hold dominion
• Self Alienation
  • Who am i? I was capable of doing this yesterday? I don’t think of myself as being capable of that but I did. Is there something wrong with me?
  • The self can be at war with itself
  • The condition of being doubtful of ones identity
  • Impermanence of personal identity
  • Existentialism - “there is no self” because - Existence precedes essence
  • Bad Faith is the denial that you are totally free and totally responsible
    • pure possibility, of free will
    • To be in bad faith is to be alienated from who you are, because who you are is pure possibility, and to think you are not is bad faith
    • Existentialists believe, in one sense, that you can never be self alienated
      • If there is no self! Which they think that there isn’t.
      • You're always building your identity, of course you will be a stranger to yourself, but that is who you are.
    • In the other sense, you CAN be alienated because you deny existence before essence.
  • When you're in a racist society and you’re not a racist you’re going to be alienated
    • Social alienation = dehumanization, objectification
    • When do people WANT alienation?
      • Mirrors - allow us to see ourselves as objects
      • We want to be seen as others see us
    • Are we the same people we are when we're alone as with others?
      • We are never alone, we have the socialized ideas of all others we’ve interacted with in our minds all of the time
    • Feral Children
      • Does Not apply, does not have the language

3/13

• Theistic Existentialists
  • We need to start worshiping “The God above god.”
    • Tillich
• Dostoyevsky
  • Toothache
    • Is it rational to choose to live with a toothache rather than go to the dentist to fix it? No. But! It is within his right to choose. It is triumphant for your will to overcome your rationality
      • This foreshadows the existentialist viewpoint of the choice to be absurd, irrational, etc as long as it is free choice, not following the lead of rationality, science, etc
• Modernism (18th century - end of WWII)
  • Democracy
  • Faith in social, scientific, + technological progress
  • Triumph of reason
  • Industrialization
  • Urbanization
  • Secularization
  • Nature is available for human needs
  • Bureaucratization
• Existential Artists/Art
  • Alberto Giaccometti
    • The Partisans
  • Salvador Dali
    • The Persistence of memory
  • Edvard Munch
    • The Scream
  • George Tooker
    • The Waiting Room
• Who will heal the running sores of the world?
  • Art/Artists

3/8

1. What does it mean to philosophize (in the traditional western sense)?

To have a philosophy of x:

1. What is the nature (essence) of X?
2. How are X’s different from everything else?
3. Are there different kinds of X’s?
4. What is the purpose of X?
   1. Vengeance
   2. Kiss of death
   3. Love
   4. devotion
5. Is X a thing (substance), or property, or process, or activity?
   1. A thing exists, and has properties
      1. My marker (substance) is white and black (properties)
6. What causes X to come into being (necessary + sufficient conditions)?
7. How do we come to know X?

The philosophy of a kiss:

Q 6:

Necessary: Lips (1 pair), consciousness, purpose

Sufficient: Attraction, two people, consent,

Q 3:

Yes. French (the existentialist way)

Familial

Kissing the ground

Friendship

Romantic

Inanimate objects

Devotion

Blowing a kiss

Hershey kiss

Nose kisses

Eyelash kisses

Phenomenological approach (essential to the existentialist “revolt”)

• Essential to the “revolt of the existentialists”

1. How does X appear to consciousness?
2. How does X make you feel?
3. What do you interact with?
4. What does it do to the consciousness of another?
   1. Insecurity
   2. Guilt
   3. Jealousy
   4. Validation
   5. Loved
   6. Reciprocate feelings
   7. Horny
   8. Sad
   9. Angry
   10. Remorseful
   11. Resentful
   12. Happy
   13. Giddy
   14. Embarrassed
   15. Makes them introspective
   16. Awesome
   17. Reassured
   18. Wanted
   19. Worshiped
   20. Dominant
   21. Subservient
   22. Objectified
   23. Violated
   24. Unwanted
   25. pitied
5. What does it do to your body?
6. What is the social context?

What circumstances created the need for existentialism (a new way of thinking)?

• 2 worldwide economic depressions
• 2 world wars
  • Existentialism mainly western philosophy, focused in france
• Atomic bomb, nuclear weapons
• Cold war
• Rise of science and technology as the new gods
• Corruption which delegitimized world authority
• The birth control pill (?)
  • Created an atmosphere of eroding authority
    • Especially the authority of the catholic church
• The pandemic of 1918 (hella people died about 500 mil)

Philosophers

• Existentialists
  • Camus
  • Sartre
  • De Beauvoir
  • Kafka
  • Kierkegaard
  • Nietzsche
• Precursors
  • Pascal
  • Dostoevsky
• Antagonists (oppositional)
  • Barth
  • Hegel
• Divert/diversions
  • Escape mechanisms/defense mechanisms
• The problem of evil
  • The Attributes of God
    • All-loving
    • Omniscient
    • Omnipotent
    • Omnipresent
    • All just
    • non-material
  • However; the innocent suffer
• Deists
  • Believe in god as the creator, but dipped out after creating us
    • Let humans to our own devices
  • God is NOT all loving or all just
• Not to commit / commitment
• Commitment to a subject value
  • Value
    • Your priorities, your beliefs, etc
• Human beings are pathetic and subject to social pressures
  • Can’t separate themselves from “The Herd” -Nietzsche and “The They” - Heidegger
  • Individualism - existentialism
    • Your value is being a committed individual, and being subjective
  • Advice
    • If you are stuck morally, you should invent
      • If your actions take away the freedom of another, then you must not do it
• Concepts introduced by Barth in The End of the Road
  • Cosmopsis
    • Paralysis, inability to choose, faced with too many choices
    • Satire of existentialism, as Sarte says “you have unlimited responsibility”
  • Weatherless
    • An empty mental state without any moods, personality, or motivation due to being overwhelmed from so many choices
  • To fix the cosmopsis, you go to a Remobilization Farm where the doctor administers Mythotherapy
  • Mythotherapy: assuming multiple social masks which are myth making devices to enable you to assume multiple personal identities
    • Barth making fun of the existentialist belief that your essence is ever changing that there is no “core you”
    • Ridiculing the existentialist point of view that action is the basis of everything, that it doesn't matter what you do but only that you act (page 450) second column, “you claim to be unable [...] so long as you think you have one”
    • Makes fun of atheist existentialism
    • Sinistrality, antecedence, alphabetical priority, “arbitrary but useful”
      • Barth slammin the existentialist viewpoint of “do what you want, all is arbitrary, do whatever as long as you do” (pg 451)
    • Hedonism
      • Pursuit of pleasure
    • Egoist
      • Pursuit of own pleasure/health/wellbeing
    • Altruist
      • Pursuit of other’s pleasure/health/wellbeing
  • Pg. 453, “its extremely important [...] now say something”
    • No real sense of self in existentialism, no purpose, no nothing. It’s bullshit.
  • Barth is parodying existentialist philosophy
  • Parody
    • An imitation of the style of a particular writer, artist, or genre with deliberate exaggeration bordering on ridicule for comic effect
• Existential Crisis
  • The condition of human beings, singly or in groups, experience a traumatic event or a traumatic condition which is urgent and provokes feelings of anxiety, fear, dread, anguish, despair, abandonment or terror.
• If an issue discusses the essential meaning, it’s talking about essences

Developing An Argument

• A necessary condition is a condition in which in the absence of which the event in question will not occur
• A sufficient condition or set of conditions is a condition in the presence of which the event must occur (a sufficient condition creates a guarantee that such event must occur)
• EX: Fire, combustion
  • It takes oxygen, fuel source, and ignition source to create fire (heat, match)
    • These 3 things are all necessary because in the absence of one of them fire will not occur
    • If all 3 of these things are present, they are sufficient to make the fire occur (aka in the presence of all 3, there must occur a fire)
• Argument
  • 3 elements (these elements are both necessary and sufficient to create an argument)
    • 1. The premises
    • 2. The conclusion
      • What you want to establish as true
      • MUST address the ISSUE
    • 3. The inference
      • I believe that this conclusion is true because it is supported by the evidence
  • The Trigger - The issue
    • What gets the argument going for an issue?
• Common errors in arguments are called Fallacies
  • Error of not addressing the issue in the conclusion is called the Fallacy of the irrelevant conclusion
    • Ex. Is the best way to deal with an existential crisis and its aftermath to repress it?
      • Repressing an existential crises is not/is the best way to deal
• The ISSUE focuses the reasoning
• Outline (standard form)
  • Listing and numbering all of your premises
    • In standard form, only ONE sentence, and conclusion must be ONE grammatically correct sentence as well
  • 3 dot triangle symbol/the word Therefore - signals conclusion
  • Evidence must drive the argument and conclusion
• When presenting an argument, precede it by stating the issue
• Always start by defining the critical terms in the issue
• Example: Is the best way to deal with an existential crisis and its aftermath to repress it?
  • Premises:
    • 1. Define Terms:
      • “Existential Crises”
      • “best”, what context?
      • “Repression”
    • 2. Repression is a psychological timebomb, and must be addressed.
    • 3. Research
      • According to (name of source), the evidence shows this
    • 4. Repression is psychologically harmful
  • Conclusion: Therefore, the best way to deal with an existential crisis is to not repress it.
  • Inference:
• Folk Psychology
  • Common understandings of how psychological processes work
    • Many philosophers target this as not being reliable, whereas some champion it as being reliable + everyday wisdom
  • In this aspect of research, we are not looking for folk psychology, but the result of Academic research
• Ex post facto
  • Understood, needs no explanation
  • Self justifying
• Two kinds of arguments (claim for truth of the conclusion)
  • Deductive
    • Some arguments require you to be deductive
      • Ex:
        • All people are mortal
        • Eleanor is a person

Therefore, Eleanor is mortal

• • • Will claim - I GUARANTEE that the conclusion is NECESSARILY true
      • Argument turned on logic rather than experience or experimentation
  • Inductive
    • Will claim - Probability + likelihood
    • As the evidence accumulates, the Strength of the argument increases
      • The claim that The best way to deal with an existential crisis is to not repress it (INDUCTIVE)

How to Conduct Research:

• Tessa Mediano
  • researchhelp@risd.edu
• Fleet Library Website
  • Catalog Search - very straightforward, normal keyword searching
  • Fleet Search
    • No images or multimedia, just written resources
    • Searches Fleet catalog as well as databases, academic articles, etc.
• Can use www.library.brown.edu
• EBSCO Host
  • Library home page, scroll down to find Ebook collection, click on ebsco link
• JSTOR
• Project Muse
• Research help, tab down, Research guide
  • How to guides, library basics (these guide you through citation, research basics)
• Generative Artificial Intelligence
• Article, The psychology of repression and polarization
• Good Source: Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Feb 21, 2024

• Existential Crisis
  • Not treated as a neurosis or condition that can be treated with therapy
  • Human condition
  • “We all die”
    • repress or obsess
  • Herdegger (existentialist)
    • Be a “being-towards-death”
  • Trying to create a new language
  • How do things appear to consciousness (phenomenologists)
  • Twist the language (hyphens)
• Agency
  • Accepting one's power to act consequentiality
  • Opposite of determinism
• Angst
  • Deep and abiding fearfulness feeling when contemplating death
• I am hurtling towards death, I better understand that.Stop wasting time.
• Basis for agency - free will - basis for free will - that you have a consciousness
• Sarte:
  • Consciousness is the basis for your nothingness
• Free Will
  • Metaphysical libertarianism
    • Not political, talk about free will, want to assert that it is possible
• Choice = free will to existentialists you are NEVER POWERLESS
• Unconscious being = no choice/no awareness = no free will
• Fault/ Lies/guilty
  • Existentialism would not use these words to make you feel bad. They want to know if you TAKE RESPONSIBILITY
  • You never release RESPONSIBILITY and on this BAD FAITH hinges
• Bad Faith is the denial that you are pure possibility, of free will
  • For existentialists there are no excuses
• Sartre + Simone de Beauvoir
  • Strident about rejecting excuses, lived through Nazi Germany’s occupation of paris
    • “I was following orders”
  • “There is no love without loving acts”
  • Action = culpability
  • Intentions are bullshit, action is real
• No excuses but also not defined by your past
  • Not defined by your facility (your past is a fact)
  • This is liberating, focus on the future, no guilt no blame
  • Focuses on moving forward and making better choices.
  • Anti war/anti vietnam moment was an existentialist movement
  • Problem of subjectivity

Feb 16, 2024

• Existentialism (1930’s-70’s)
• Balancing body and mind
• Traditional Philosophy
  • What is the nature of X?
  • Nature: Signals that things have essences
• Traditional
  • Essence precedes existence
    • Social implications
      • No choice
      • Social hierarchies
      • Ethics
      • No becoming
  • Actuality + potentiality
    • The child has the potential to become an adult
    • Limitations of potentiality = capability
    • Difference between who I am and what can happen to me
• Existentialism
  • Existence precedes essence
  • Choice
    • Choices that are acted upon
  • Free Will
    • Sarte
      • “Bad faith”
  • Actions! Intentions mean nothing
  • Existentialism presumes free will exists
  • Consciousness
    • Brings value into the world
      • Social hierarchy is a type of value
      • Hierarchy is PERMEABLE (existentialism) or PERMANENT (traditional)
  • Existentialists = potential is limitless
• Free Will or Determinism?
  • Free Will = ability to disengage from the causal network + decide course of action
  • Determinism
    • For every event, there's a cause or set of causes that makes it happen
    • No rebase, you are caused to act always. No escape
• Free will may not exist, but we need it
• Is it possible that free will is believed to manufacture blame? (The free will controversy)
• Existentialism
  • Free will is needed to create moral responsibility
  • If you are absolutely free, you are responsible for all of your actions
• “Lived philosophy” vs and “armchair philosophy”
  • Existentialism
    • A lived philosophy doesn’t want you trapped in the intellectual exercise of free will vs. determinism
• Theist
  • One who believes in a supreme being/s
  • Subscribes to essences precedes existence
  • Creation of the soul (essence of the human being)
  • You have an objective value just by being a human
• Nihilism
  • The belief that there is no meaning to life
  • There is no cosmic significance to my life
• Atheists
  • No belief in a god, yet no subscription to nihilism
• Nietzsche, “God is dead and we have killed him”
• Can you be a nihilist, an atheist, + an existentialist?
• Objective vs subjective purpose
• Subjective value
  • A truth is subjective if it is true to you
  • Oliver has a headache. Can I prove that he doesn’t? No? Ok. That's his subjective viewpoint
• Existentialists - the subjective value