Mind Philosopher: Philosophers

Jean-Paul Sartre~The Nobel Prize in Literature 1964

Freedom is what you do with what's been done to you.

~Jean Paul Sartre.

Jean-Paul Sartre, (1905-1980) born in Paris in 1905, studied at the École Normale Supérieure from 1924 to 1929 and became Professor of Philosophy at Le Havre in 1931. With the help of a stipend from the Institut Français he studied in Berlin (1932) the philosophies of Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger. After further teaching at Le Havre, and then in Laon, he taught at the Lycée Pasteur in Paris from 1937 to 1939. Since the end of the Second World War, Sartre has been living as an independent writer.

Sartre is one of those writers for whom a determined philosophical position is the centre of their artistic being. Although drawn from many sources, for example, Husserl's idea of a free, fully intentional consciousness and Heidegger's existentialism, the existentialism Sartre formulated and popularized is profoundly original. Its popularity and that of its author reached a climax in the forties, and Sartre's theoretical writings as well as his novels and plays constitute one of the main inspirational sources of modern literature. In his philosophical view atheism is taken for granted; the "loss of God" is not mourned. Man is condemned to freedom, a freedom from all authority, which he may seek to evade, distort, and deny but which he will have to face if he is to become a moral being. The meaning of man's life is not established before his existence. Once the terrible freedom is acknowledged, man has to make this meaning himself, has to commit himself to a role in this world, has to commit his freedom. And this attempt to make oneself is futile without the "solidarity" of others.

The conclusions a writer must draw from this position were set forth in "Qu'est-ce que la littérature?" (What Is Literature?), 1948: literature is no longer an activity for itself, nor primarily descriptive of characters and situations, but is concerned with human freedom and its (and the author's) commitment. Literature is committed; artistic creation is a moral activity.

While the publication of his early, largely psychological studies, L'Imagination (1936), Esquisse d'une théorie des émotions (Outline of a Theory of the Emotions), 1939, and L'Imaginaire: psychologie phénoménologique de l'imagination (The Psychology of Imagination), 1940, remained relatively unnoticed, Sartre's first novel, La Nausée (Nausea), 1938, and the collection of stories Le Mur (The Wall and other Stories), 1938, brought him immediate recognition and success. They dramatically express Sartre's early existentialist themes of alienation and commitment, and of salvation through art.

His central philosophical work, L'Etre et le néant (Being and Nothingness), 1943, is a massive structuralization of his concept of being, from which much of modern existentialism derives. The existentialist humanism which Sartre propagates in his popular essay L'Existentialisme est un humanisme (Existentialism is a Humanism), 1946, can be glimpsed in the series of novels, Les Chemins de la Liberté (The Roads to Freedom), 1945-49.

Sartre is perhaps best known as a playwright. In Les Mouches (The Flies), 1943, the young killer's committed freedom is pitted against the powerless Jupiter, while in Huis Clos (No Exit), 1947, hell emerges as the togetherness of people.

Sartre has engaged extensively in literary critisicm and has written studies on Baudelaire (1947) and Jean Genet (1952). A biography of his childhood, Les Mots (The Words), appeared in 1964.

From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969

Source : http://www.nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1964/sartre-bio.html

http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/j/jeanpaul_sartre.html

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ft0lPtPdTp8

7:05 PM
0 Comments

Dante : Biography

Philosophers

Dante

Dante : Biography

Dante was an Italian poet and moral philosopher best known for the epic poem The Divine Comedy, which comprises sections representing the three tiers of the Christian afterlife: purgatory, heaven, and hell. This poem, a great work of medieval literature and considered the greatest work of literature composed in Italian, is a philosophical Christian vision of mankind’s eternal fate. Dante is seen as the father of modern Italian, and his works have flourished since before his 1321 death.

Early Years

Dante Alighieri was born in 1265 to a family with a history of involvement in the complex Florentine political scene, and this setting would become a feature in his Inferno years later. Dante’s mother died only a few years after his birth, and when Dante was around 12 years old, it was arranged that he would marry Gemma Donati, the daughter of a family friend. Around 1285, the pair married, but Dante was in love with another woman—Beatrice Portinari, who would be a huge influence on Dante and whose character would form the backbone of Dante’s Divine Comedy.

Dante met Beatrice when she was but nine years old, and he had apparently experienced love at first sight. The pair were acquainted for years, but Dante’s love for Beatrice was “courtly” (which could be called an expression of love and admiration, usually from afar) and unrequited. Beatrice died unexpectedly in 1290, and five years later Dante published Vita Nuova (The New Life), which details his tragic love for Beatrice. (Beyond being Dante’s first book of verse, The New Life is notable in that it was written in Italian, whereas most other works of the time appeared in Latin.)

Around the time of Beatrice’s death, Dante began to immerse himself in the study of philosophy and the machinations of the Florentine political scene. Florence was then was a tumultuous city, with factions representing the papacy and the empire continually at odds, and Dante held a number of important public posts. In 1302, however, he fell out of favor and was exiled for life by the leaders of the Black Guelphs (among them, Corso Donati, a distant relative of Dante’s wife), the political faction in power at the time and who were in league with Pope Boniface VIII. (The pope, as well as countless other figures from Florentine politics, finds a place in the hell that Dante creates in Inferno—and an extremely unpleasant one.) Dante may have been driven out of Florence, but this would be the beginning of his most productive artistic period.

Exile

In his exile, Dante traveled and wrote, conceiving The Divine Comedy, and he withdrew from all political activities. In 1304, he seems to have gone to Bologna, where he began his Latin treatise "De Vulgari Eloquentia" (“The Eloquent Vernacular”), in which he urged that courtly Italian, used for amatory writing, be enriched with aspects of every spoken dialect in order to establish Italian as a serious literary language. The created language would thus be one way to attempt to unify the divided Italian territories. The work was left unfinished, but it has been influential nonetheless.

In March 1306, Florentine exiles were expelled from Bologna, and by August, Dante ended up in Padua, but from this point Dante’s whereabouts are not know for sure for a few years. Reports place him in Paris at times between 1307 and 1309, but his visit to the city can’t be verified.

In 1308, Henry of Luxembourg was elected emperor as Henry VII. Full of optimism about the changes this election could bring to Italy (in effect, Henry VII could at last restore peace from his imperial throne while at the same time subordinate his spirituality to religious authority), Dante wrote his famous work on the monarchy, "De Monarchia,” in three books, in which he claims that the authority of the emperor is not dependent on the pope but descends upon him directly from God. However, Henry’s popularity faded quickly, and his enemies had gathered strength, threatening his ascension to the throne. These enemies, as Dante saw it, were members of the Florentine government, so Dante wrote a diatribe against them and was promptly included on a list of those permanently banned from the city. Around this time, he began writing his most famous work, The Divine Comedy.

The Divine Comedy

In the spring of 1312, Dante seems to have gone with the other exiles to meet up with the new emperor at Pisa (Henry’s rise was sustained, and he was named Holy Roman Emperor in 1312), but again, his exact whereabouts during this period are uncertain. By 1314, however, Dante had completed the Inferno, the segment of The Divine Comedy set in hell, and in 1317 he settled at Ravenna and there completed The Divine Comedy (soon before his death in 1321).

The Divine Comedy is an allegory of human life presented as a visionary trip through the Christian afterlife, written as a warning to a corrupt society to steer itself to the path of righteousness: "to remove those living in this life from the state of misery, and lead them to the state of felicity." The poem is written in the first person (from the poet’s perspective) and follows Dante's journey through the three Christian realms of the dead: hell, purgatory, and finally heaven. The Roman poet Virgil guides Dante through hell (Inferno) and purgatory (Purgatorio), while Beatrice guides him through heaven (Paradiso). The journey lasts from the night before Good Friday to the Wednesday after Easter in the spring of 1300 (placing it before Dante’s factual exile from Florence, which looms throughout the Inferno and serves as an undercurrent to the poet’s journey).

The structure of the three realms of the afterlife follows a common pattern of nine stages plus an additional, and paramount, tenth: nine circles of hell, followed by Lucifer’s level at the bottom; nine rings of purgatory, with the Garden of Eden at its peak; and the nine celestial bodies of heaven, followed by the empyrean (the highest stage of heaven, where God resides).

The poem is composed of 100 cantos, written in the measure known as terza rima (thus the divine number 3 appears in each part of the poem), which Dante modified from its popular form so that it might be regarded as his own invention.

Virgil guides Dante through hell and a phenomenal array of sinners in their various states, and Dante and Virgil stop along the way to speak with various characters. Each circle of hell is reserved for those who have committed specific sins, and Dante spares no artistic expense at creating the punishing landscape. For instance, in the ninth circle (reserved for those guilty of treachery), occupants are buried in ice up to their chins, chew on each other and are beyond redemption, damned eternally to their new fate. In the final circle, there is no one left to talk to (as Satan is buried to the waist in ice, weeping from his six eyes and chewing Judas, Cassius and Brutus, the three greatest traitors in history, by Dante’s accounting), and the duo moves on to purgatory.

In the Purgatorio, Virgil leads Dante in a long climb up the Mount of Purgatory, through seven levels of suffering and spiritual growth (an allegory for the seven deadly sins), before reaching the earthly paradise at the top. The poet’s journey here represents the Christian life, in which Dante must learn to reject the earthly paradise he sees for the heavenly one that awaits.

Beatrice, representing divine enlightenment, leads Dante through the Paradiso, up through the nine levels of the heavens (represented as various celestial spheres) to true paradise: the empyrean, where God resides. Along the way, Dante encounters those who on earth were giants of intellectualism, faith, justice and love, such as Thomas Aquinas, King Solomon and Dante’s own great-great-grandfather. In the final sphere, Dante comes face to face with God himself, who is represented as three concentric circles, which in turn represent the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit. The journey ends here with true heroic and spiritual fulfillment.

Legacy

Dante’s Divine Comedy has flourished for more than 650 years and has been considered a major work since Giovanni Boccaccio wrote a biography of Dante in 1373. (By 1400, at least 12 commentaries had already been written on the poem’s meaning and significance.) The work is a major part of the Western canon, and T.S. Eliot, who was greatly influenced by Dante, put Dante in a class with only one other poet of the modern world, Shakespeare, saying that they ”divide the modern world between them. There is no third.”

Source : http://www.biography.com/#!/people/dante-9265912

11:09 AM
0 Comments

Confucius - Biography

Philosophers

Confucius

Confucius - Biography

Confucius, or as literally translated, Master Kong (K'ung-fu-tzu or Kongfuzi), lived and worked during what is known as the Chinese Spring and Autumn Period (770-481 BCE), and is by tradition said to have been born on the 28th of September in 551 BCE in the state of Lu located on the Shandong peninsula in northeastern China and died in 479 BCE. It is said, “by tradition” because it is difficult to distinguish much of Confucius’ life between the factual and the legendary. Confucius was an infamous Chinese thinker and educator, comparable to Socrates in the West, who developed a social and political philosophy that is often considered to be the foundation of subsequent Chinese thought. He was the founder of the Ru School of Chinese thought and the philosophical school of thought that has come to bear his name, Confucianism, comes from his tradition and the fragments that were recorded in the text called Analects (Lunyu). One of his most renowned concepts is summed up in the often translated and transmitted phrase:

Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself

As mentioned, it is difficult to trace the historical Confucius as his myth and legend have far surpassed the mere factual coordinates of his life. One legend has it that Confucius was born in answer to his parents prayers they made at a sacred hill (qui) called Ni and hence his names attest as such: Kong equates to the thanking of prayers answered, his forbidden name was Qui and his public name was Zhongni. Fact or fiction, the majority of what we know about Confucius comes from the Analects and other transcriptions and records of his thoughts and goings-on that were mostly transcribed during the Warring States Period (403-221 BCE) in which there was an ongoing struggle among the small states in China to regain the primacy and power of the Zhou. As well, the well-known text, Records of the Grand Historian (Shiji), written by Sima Qian (145-c.85 BCE), who was court historian to the Han dynasty, includes many accounts of the life and teachings of Confucius. The latter identifies Confucius as a descendent of the Royal State of Song yet grew up in the small state of Lu due to his grandfather’s having to flee the turmoil that besieged that of the state of Song. His life in Lu was said to have begun in poverty as accounts have stated that his father died when he was just three and he was raised by his mother in which he soon had to take various odd jobs once he came of age. He apparently wed a young girl named, Qi Guan, who bore him a son, Kong Li.

His educational background is unclear except that tradition claims him to have studied with Lao Dan, the Daoist Master, as well as with Chang Hong and Xiang in music and lute respectively. What is clear is that education or study was extremely important to Confucius in which one must be dependent and independent; he is recorded in the Analects as saying: “He who learns but does not think is lost. He who thinks but does not learn is in great danger.” The Analects, recorded during the Warring States era, are said to reveal the dialogues between Confucius and his pupils in which he transmits, and perhaps expands, on the ideas, or the way (Dao) of the ancient Zhou. He was known to say that he was a transmitter and not a maker, and he had a passion for the wisdom of the Zhou sages upon which his teachings were based, or transmitted from. It is worth noting that it was in the fall of the Zhou Empire that the various small states began to vie for power and such a unified loss was a probable influence on Confucius.

Confucius gathered a following or a group of disciples, the number of which has been overly exaggerated according to scholars. There are claims that he had as many as three thousand, though more accurate accounts put that number at seventy-two (though this number is also suspicious as it is a magic number and purportedly the age of his death). Regardless, Confucius was open to teaching all, no matter their class, through his interpretation of his study and centered that espousal on the edifice of learning as well. His method was never to teach in a preacher-like manner, but rather in a motivational one (so-to-speak), such that the pupil must answer for himself: “I only instruct the eager and enlighten the fervent. If I hold up one corner and a student cannot come back to me with the other three, I do not go on with the lesson.”

His teachings, as did his own learning, emphasized morality, government, speech and language and the arts. As well he focused on what was referred to as the Six Arts: archery, calligraphy, chariot, computation, music and ritual. Of the various subjects though, it was morality that was considered of utmost importance above all else. Through a proper understanding and practice of morality all else could be derived, harmonized and rectified. This is revealed in a famous lesson in which a student asks if there is one word that could guide a person through life, the master’s answer is “reciprocity” (shu), and the ‘answer’ is a suggestion, followed by the exemplifying phrase, “never impose on others what you would not choose for yourself.” A moral education, ideally, provides one with the building blocks for self-cultivation, harmony and ethical action, which can maintain and restore value and meaning for society (something which he considered lost in the loss of the Zhou reign). And for Confucius, it was in the Book of Songs, through its poetry, where one could find the epitome of such imperative study in morality.

The aesthetic is very much an important element in the philosophy of Confucius. The aesthetic is beautiful and good and as poetry can yield such manner so should man’s comportment. What by some interpretations may seem as mere etiquette is much more deeply an issue of aesthetic gratitude and respect. It is one of the key elements to his idea of a harmonious order. Such an order included a special relationship to and serving of the spirits. He maintained that he had a special relationship to Tian, the Zhou deity referring to sky or heaven. He acknowledged its changing status and relationship over time, pre-dating the Zhou, and acknowledged the ‘existential’ dilemma in such change, yet maintained a balanced interpretation in which man is subject to the parameters set forth by the Tian though is a free agent within those parameters and responsible for his actions. Therefore, there is an aesthetic, moral and social co-mingling order that ensures the highest order of harmony, which can be effected through li (ritual propriety). One must learn and perform properly and at the proper time for the greater good.

Through li one can cultivate and master the idea of ren (compassion, or the loving of others), a core component of his thinking. Together this involves deprecating oneself as opposed to being artificial in making the appearance of a better impression: to be true and sincere to oneself is to take care of the other as well; to master self-discipline not as a form or self-repression but as a way to accommodate both the self and the other. Such is enacted in the performance of li, and not as mere obligation, but precisely as sincere devotion: “look at nothing in defiance of ritual, listen to nothing in defiance of ritual, speak of nothing in defiance or ritual, never stir hand or foot in defiance of ritual.”

The importance of such comportment is as well, and clearly as could be no other way, integral to the operations of political life. While he deemed that the elders and the learned are to be respected and honored, that in fact the best practice of ren is through the devotion and respect of one’s elders, he was keen to make aware that such filial propriety is not to be abused. There is no ruler who is essentially “better” than a peasant, and the former should never take for granted the latter. As is true for the social is true for governance—self-discipline through compassion and the love of others.

One who rules by moral force may be compared to the North Star – it occupies its place and all the stars pay homage to it.

As well, the system of governance should follow a hierarchy, as does the notion of li in a familial setting such that a legitimate and honorable hierarchy is established and respected as it (when it) collectively adheres to the harmonic order of li and ren. This theory takes on the name of zhengming, in which the principle forms of government have their appropriate names and corresponding behaviors. “Good government consists in the ruler being a ruler, the minister being a minister, the father being a father, and the son being a son.” This notion of adjudication is considered essential, as the devolution of governance is believed by Confucius to take place in the devolution of one’s place and the attributes and performance of one’s position.

Proper, ideal governance is, above all else, dependent upon de, or virtue. It is a moral force that incorporates the performance of li and the presence of ren. The ceremonial, in this context, is far from pomp and circumstance, but rather a sincere activation of virtue, which has the effect of performing governance. Confucius spoke of such in defiance of acts of aggressive force or imposition of law and law enforcement, which would be antithetical to the force of morality. As he states: “If the people be led by laws, and uniformity among them be sought by punishments, they will try to escape punishment and have no sense of shame. If they are led by virtue, and uniformity sought among them through the practice of ritual propriety, they will possess a sense of shame and come to you of their own accord.” Virtue, metaphorically, leads on its own accord.

Confucius, himself, did not become officially involved in politics until the age of fifty. Under Duke Ding of the state of Lu, Confucius was first appointed Minister of Public Works, which was then followed by the position as Minister of Crime. Apparently, he was forced to leave his position in the ministry of the Duke due to conflicting desires of the nobility of Lu or perhaps the Duke himself—the exact reasons are not clear. He did take leave, or some have said in exile, and traveled with some of his disciples through the other neighboring states of Cai, Chen, Chu, Song and Wei. He apparently sought positions in the ministries of these states yet was unsuccessful. In 484 BCE he returned to his home state of Lu and devoted the rest of his life to teaching.

The Analects give us most of what we know about Confucius and while Confucius claimed to be a mere transmitter, scholars agree that he in fact did much more than transmit and in fact it is his interpretations, expansions and departures that honored him with such a lasting reputation. His teachings were evolutionary, radical and enlightening. His legacy has had long lasting and far-reaching impact in both the eastern and western traditions. He is an amazing figure in history and in legend as the two can never be separated and it speaks to his almost magical presence in the history of Chinese thought. His age of death, seventy-two, was itself a magic number and again leaves open the uncertainty of what is true and what is retrospective mythologizing. It has been convened that the thinker was under recognized in his time yet his legend, and more importantly his teachings, lived on. At the end of the 4th century, Mencius was to say of Confucius, “ever since man came into this world, there has never been one greater than Confucius.”

4:51 PM
0 Comments

Immanuel Kant

Philosophers

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)

Immanuel Kant was born in Königsberg, East Prussia in 1724. He attended the Collegium Fridiricianum at the age of eight, a Latin school that taught primarily classicism. After over eight years of study there, he went into the University Of Königsberg, where he spent his academic career focusing on philosophy, mathematics and physics. The death of his father had a strong effect on Kant, he left the university and earned a living as a private tutor. However, in 1755 he accepted the help of a friend and resumed study, receiving his doctorate in 1756.

He taught at the university and remained there for 15 years, beginning his lectures on the sciences and mathematics, though over time he covered most branches of philosophy. In spite of his growing reputation as an original thinker, he did not gain tenure at the university until 1770, receiving his professorship of logic and metaphysics. He continued writing and lecturing at Königsberg for the next 27 years, drawing many students there due to his rationalist and hence, unorthodox approach to religious texts. This led to political pressure from the government of Prussia, and in 1792, he was barred from teaching or writing on religious subjects by the king, Fredrich William II. Kant dutifully obeyed the injunction until the death of the king five years later, returning to the writing and lecturing of his ideas. The year following his retirement, he published a summary of his views on religion. He died in 1804.

Kant devised a model, an individual epistemology, by examining the basis of human knowledge and its limits. He brought together the ideas of rationalism, influential thinkers such as Leibniz and Wolff, with empiricism as proposed by David Hume. Kant's critical philosophy is presented in the Critique of Pure Reason (1781); the idea of critique is to establish and investigate the legitimate limits of human knowledge. Knowledge of sensible objects must form itself in advance to the structures of the human mind's ability to reason, and therefore all objects conform themselves a priori in such a relation -legitimate knowledge of objects is limited to how they appear for us.

Kant's logic creates a division and complex interplay of judgments- a priori and a posteriori judgments and analytic or synthetic judgments. A judgment is analytic if the subject of its proposition is contained within its predicate, i.e. "Sound theories are theories". To state the reverse would be a logical absurdity. The judgment is considered analytic because the truth of the proposition lies in the validity of the concept itself. All analytic judgments are a priori and thus, as is the case for all a priori judgments, they are independent of experience. However, judgments about empirical knowledge can only be made upon experience, are synthetic, a posteriori, and can be reversed without such a contradiction, i.e. "The theory is sound".

Here unfolds three classes of judgments: a) analytic a priori, b) synthetic a posteriori, and c) synthetic a priori. The particular concern for Kant is the synthetic a priori, for the sciences and mathematics are as such, existing independent of experience and yet as syntheses of previous judgments (knowledge). The question as to the origins of judgments becomes necessary. Metaphysics describes a science concerned with this inquiry, a solution to unsolvable problems set by pure reason itself, namely the concepts of God, freedom and immortality.

Kant developed a system of ethics in Metaphysics of Ethics (1797), in which he places reason as the fundamental authority for morality. Any action born of a mere expediency or servitude to law, politic or custom could be considered as moral, a sense of duty must arise solely as prescribed by reason. Reason dictates two imperatives: the hypothetical and the categorical. In the case of the former, a course of action to accomplish a specific task is presented, and in the latter a course of action that presents itself as appropriate, and necessary. The categorical is the basis for the ethical. This structure defends a fundamental freedom of the individual; that each one be responsible for their own ability, through reason, to obey consciously the laws of the universe.

Kantian philosophy was to have an enormous impact on modern philosophy as well as the fine arts and literature. Hegel was to develop the dialectical method based on elements within the Critique of Pure Reason, which in turn functioned as an underlying structure in Marx's philosophy.

Source : http://www.egs.edu/library/immanuel-kant/biography/

9:23 AM
0 Comments

Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosophers

Friedrich Nietzsche

Philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken bei Lützen, Germany. In his brilliant but relatively brief career, he published numerous major works of philosophy, including Twilight of the Idols and Thus Spoke Zarathustra. In the last decade of his life he suffered from insanity; he died on August 25, 1900. His writings on individuality and morality in contemporary civilization influenced many major thinkers and writers of the 20th century.

Early Years and Education

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, in Röcken bei Lützen, a small village in Prussia (part of present-day Germany). His father, Carl Ludwig Nietzsche, was a Lutheran preacher; he died when Nietzsche was 4 years old. Nietzsche and his younger sister, Elisabeth, were raised by their mother, Franziska.

Nietzsche attended a private preparatory school in Naumburg and then received a classical education at the prestigious Schulpforta school. After graduating in 1864, he attended the University of Bonn for two semesters. He transferred to the University of Leipzig, where he studied philology, a combination of literature, linguistics and history. He was strongly influenced by the writings of philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer. During his time in Leipzig, he began a friendship with the composer Richard Wagner, whose music he greatly admired.

Teaching and Writing in the 1870s

In 1869, Nietzsche took a position as professor of classical philology at the University of Basel in Switzerland. During his professorship he published his first books, The Birth of Tragedy (1872) and Human, All Too Human (1878). He also began to distance himself from classical scholarship, as well as the teachings of Schopenhauer, and to take more interest in the values underlying modern-day civilization. By this time, his friendship with Wagner had deteriorated. Suffering from a nervous disorder, he resigned from his post at Basel in 1879.

Literary and Philosophical Work of the 1880s

For much of the following decade, Nietzsche lived in seclusion, moving from Switzerland to France to Italy when he was not staying at his mother's house in Naumburg. However, this was also a highly productive period for him as a thinker and writer. One of his most significant works, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, was published in four volumes between 1883 and 1885. He also wrote Beyond Good and Evil (published in 1886), The Genealogy of Morals (1887) and Twilight of the Idols (1889).

In these works of the 1880s, Nietzsche developed the central points of his philosophy. One of these was his famous statement that "God is dead," a rejection of Christianity as a meaningful force in contemporary life. Others were his endorsement of self-perfection through creative drive and a "will to power," and his concept of a "super-man" or "over-man" (Übermensch), an individual who strives to exist beyond conventional categories of good and evil, master and slave.

Decline and Later Years

Nietzsche suffered a collapse in 1889 while living in Turin, Italy. The last decade of his life was spent in a state of mental incapacitation. The reason for his insanity is still unknown, although historians have attributed it to causes as varied as syphilis, an inherited brain disease, a tumor and overuse of sedative drugs. After a stay in an asylum, Nietzsche was cared for by his mother in Naumburg and his sister in Weimar, Germany. He died in Weimar on August 25, 1900.

Legacy and Influence

Nietzsche is regarded as a major influence on 20th century philosophy, theology and art. His ideas on individuality, morality and the meaning of existence contributed to the thinking of philosophers Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault; Carl Jung and Sigmund Freud, two of the founding figures of psychiatry; and writers such as Albert Camus, Jean-Paul Sartre, Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse.

Less beneficially, certain aspects of Nietzsche's work were used by the Nazi Party of the 1930s–'40s as justification for its activities; this selective and misleading use of his work has somewhat darkened his reputation for later audiences.

Source : http://www.biography.com/people/friedrich-nietzsche-9423452?page=2

9:16 AM
0 Comments

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

Philosophers

Georg Wilhem Friedrich Hegel

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany. He studied philosophy and classics at Tübingen. After graduation he became a tutor and an editor and explored theology. His first published success was Phänomenologie des Geistes (The Phenomenology of Spirit) in 1807. Hegel taught at Heidelberg and Berlin, publishing work on dialectical thinking and theories of totality. He died of cholera in 1831.

Early Life

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, known to friends and family as Wilhelm, was born on August 27, 1770, in Stuttgart, Germany. He was the eldest of three children born to Georg Ludwig, who worked for the civil service, and Maria Magdalena, the daughter of a high-ranking lawyer at the Württemberg court. His mother taught Wilhelm Latin declensions before he started Latin school at age 5, after attending the German school at age 3. Although she died of a fever when Wilhelm was in his early teens (he and his father narrowly escaped the same fate), she instilled in him a love of learning, and he avidly absorbed the writings of Enlightenment philosophers.

After studying at the elite Gymnasium Illustre preparatory school in Stuttgart, he went on to study at the seminary school art the University of Tübinge, because his father was urging him to join the clergy. But friendships forged with other students, such as his roommate Friedrich W.J. von Schelling, sparked Hegel's interest in forming his own philosophy, which subverted the prevailing influence of Aristotle and of other popular philosophies. When Hegel graduated, he instead became a private tutor.

Defining His Philosophy

When Hegel's father died just before 1800, leaving him a small inheritance, Hegel was able to concentrate more fully on his system of philosophy, which had begun with religious and social themes, but began to move more toward educational reform. Building on Immanuel Kant's transcendental idealism and Rousseau's politics, Hegel developed an elaborate system of philosophy incorporating history, ethics, government and religion, and began publishing his philosophical treatises, while working as an unpaid university lecturer along with his old college friends.

Ultimately Hegel's philosophy rejected Kant's and other popular theories as too restrictive. He developed what is called dialectical thinking, as laid out in his first major work, The Phenomenology of Spirit, which was intended to be part one of his comprehensive scientific system, but was so big that it could only serve as an introduction.

Unlike Aristotle's philosophy, Hegelianism is not a "method" or set of principles, but experiential, with experiences becoming data points in forming the whole. It holds that reality is unfolding, like the chambers of a shell, and that "the rational alone is real." Hegel eschewed Absolute Mind (or Spirit) as a vantage point, in favor of the common, everyday state of mind, whereby a series of moments makes up the whole, defined as "totality."

Hegel said, perhaps hubristically, "...in writing that book I became aware of employing a new and unprecedented way of thinking." But he clarified his system by likening it to grammar: "You only really see the rewards when you later come to observe language in use and you grasp what it is that makes the language of poetry so evocative." His structure for this logic was an incorporation of thesis and antithesis into synthesis—nothing is negated; it all works together to form the whole.

From 1808 to 1815 Hegel taught philosophy and served as headmaster at a school in Nuremberg after working briefly as a newspaper editor, a job he disliked. During this time, when Hegel was around 40, he married Marie von Tucher. They went on to have three children together: a daughter who died in infancy, and sons Karl and Immanuel. Earlier, Hegel had fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig. His sister Christiane, who had been deeply distressed by his marriage, offered opportunity for Hegel's study of psychosis.

In 1816, Hegel became chair of philosophy at the University of Heidelberg and published the Encyclopedia of the Philosophical Sciences, which brought him acclaim and advanced him to the position of chair of philosophy at the University of Berlin.

Death and Legacy

Hegel died in Berlin on November 14, 1831, during an outbreak of cholera. In 1820 he had published Elements of the Philosophy of Right, but many of his lectures and other works were published after his death. His sister, distraught over his death, committed suicide three months later.

Hegel is considered the last of the great philosophical-system builders of modern times, but his philosophies quickly became politicized, set in opposition to champions of individualism such as Søren Kierkegaard and Arthur Schopenhauer. Karl Marx and extremists on the Fascist-to-Communist spectrum inverted Hegelianism so that the rational whole being greater than the sum of its parts became a justification for authoritarian creeds.

Source : http://www.biography.com/people/georg-wilhelm-friedrich-hegel-9333532?page=2

9:09 AM
0 Comments

René Descartes

Philosophers

Rene Descartes

René Descartes was born was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, France. He was extensively educated, first at a Jesuit college at age 8, then earning a law degree at 22, but an influential teacher set him on a course to apply mathematics and logic to understanding the natural world. This approach incorporated the contemplation of the nature of existence and of knowledge itself, hence his most famous observation, “I think; therefore I am.”

Early Life

Philosopher René Descartes was born on March 31, 1596, in La Haye, a small town in central France, which has since been renamed after him to honor its most famous son. He was the youngest of three children, and his mother, Jeanne Brochard, died within his first year of life. His father, Joachim, a council member in the provincial parliament, sent the children to live with their maternal grandmother, where they remained even after he remarried a few years later. But he was very concerned with good education and sent René, at age 8, to boarding school at the Jesuit college of Henri IV in La Flèche, several miles to the north, for seven years.

Descartes was a good student, although it is thought that he might have been sickly, since he didn’t have to abide by the school’s rigorous schedule and was instead allowed to rest in bed until midmorning. The subjects he studied, such as rhetoric and logic and the “mathematical arts,” which included music and astronomy, as well as metaphysics, natural philosophy and ethics, equipped him well for his future as a philosopher. So did spending the next four years earning a baccalaureate in law at the University of Poitiers. Some scholars speculate that he may have had a nervous breakdown during this time.

Descartes later added theology and medicine to his studies. But he eschewed all this, “resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world,” he wrote much later in Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason and Seeking Truth in the Sciences, published in 1637.

So he traveled, joined the army for a brief time, saw some battles and was introduced to Dutch scientist and philosopher Isaac Beeckman, who would become for Descartes a very influential teacher. A year after graduating from Poitiers, Descartes credited a series of three very powerful dreams or visions with determining the course of his study for the rest of his life.

Becoming the Father of Modern Philosophy

Descartes is considered by many to be the father of modern philosophy, because his ideas departed widely from current understanding in the early 17th century, which was more feeling-based. While elements of his philosophy weren’t completely new, his approach to them was. Descartes believed in basically clearing everything off the table, all preconceived and inherited notions, and starting fresh, putting back one by one the things that were certain, which for him began with the statement “I exist.” From this sprang his most famous quote: “I think; therefore I am.”

Since Descartes believed that all truths were ultimately linked, he sought to uncover the meaning of the natural world with a rational approach, through science and mathematics—in some ways an extension of the approach Sir Francis Bacon had asserted in England a few decades prior. In addition to Discourse on the Method, Descartes also published Meditations on First Philosophy and Principles of Philosophy, among other treatises.

Although philosophy is largely where the 20th century deposited Descartes—each century has focused on different aspects of his work—his investigations in theoretical physics led many scholars to consider him a mathematician first. He introduced Cartesian geometry, which incorporates algebra; through his laws of refraction, he developed an empirical understanding of rainbows; and he proposed a naturalistic account of the formation of the solar system, although he felt he had to suppress much of that due to Galileo’s fate at the hands of the Inquisition. His concern wasn’t misplaced—Pope Alexander VII later added Descartes’ works to the Index of Prohibited Books.

Later Life, Death and Legacy

Descartes never married, but he did have a daughter, Francine, born in the Netherlands in 1635. He had moved to that country in 1628 because life in France was too bustling for him to concentrate on his work, and Francine’s mother was a maid in the home where he was staying. He had planned to have the little girl educated in France, having arranged for her to live with relatives, but she died of a fever at age 5.

Descartes lived in the Netherlands for more than 20 years but died in Stockholm, Sweden, on February 11, 1650. He had moved there less than a year before, at the request of Queen Christina, to be her philosophy tutor. The fragile health indicated in his early life persisted. He habitually spent mornings in bed, where he continued to honor his dream life, incorporating it into his waking methodologies in conscious meditation, but the queen’s insistence on 5 am lessons led to a bout of pneumonia from which he could not recover. He was 53.

Sweden was a Protestant country, so Descartes, a Catholic, was buried in a graveyard primarily for unbaptized babies. Later, his remains were taken to the abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, the oldest church in Paris. They were moved during the French Revolution, and were put back later—although urban legend has it that only his heart is there and the rest is buried in the Panthéon.

Descartes’ approach of combining mathematics and logic with philosophy to explain the physical world turned metaphysical when confronted with questions of theology; it led him to a contemplation of the nature of existence and the mind-body duality, identifying the point of contact for the body with the soul at the pineal gland. It also led him to define the idea of dualism: matter meeting non-matter. Because his previous philosophical system had given man the tools to define knowledge of what is true, this concept led to controversy. Fortunately, Descartes himself had also invented methodological skepticism, or Cartesian doubt, thus making philosophers of us all.

Source : http://www.biography.com/people/ren%C3%A9-descartes-37613?page=2

9:00 AM
0 Comments

Aristotle

Philosophers

Aristotle

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was born circa 384 B.C. in Stagira, Greece. When he turned 17, he enrolled in Plato’s Academy. In 338, he began tutoring Alexander the Great. In 335, Aristotle founded his own school, the Lyceum, in Athens, where he spent most of the rest of his life studying, teaching and writing. Aristotle died in 322 B.C., after he left Athens and fled to Chalcis.

Early Life

Ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle was born circa 384 B.C. in Stagira, a small town on the northern coast of Greece that was once a seaport. Aristotle’s father, Nicomachus, was court physician to the Macedonian king Amyntas II. Although Nicomachus died when Aristotle was just a young boy, Aristotle remained closely affiliated with and influenced by the Macedonian court for the rest of his life. Little is known about his mother, Phaestis; she is also believed to have died when Aristotle was young.

After Aristotle’s father died, Proxenus of Atarneus, who was married to Aristotle’s older sister, Arimneste, became Aristotle’s guardian until he came of age. When Aristotle turned 17, Proxenus sent him to Athens to pursue a higher education. At the time, Athens was considered the academic center of the universe. In Athens, Aristotle enrolled in Plato’s Academy, Greek’s premier learning institution, and proved an exemplary scholar. Aristotle maintained a relationship with Greek philosopher Plato, himself a student of Socrates, and his academy for two decades. Plato died in 347 B.C. Because Aristotle had disagreed with some of Plato’s philosophical treatises, Aristotle did not inherit the position of director of the academy, as many imagined he would.

After Plato died, Aristotle’s friend Hermias, king of Atarneus and Assos in Mysia, invited Aristotle to court. During his three-year stay in Mysia, Aristotle met and married his first wife, Pythias, Hermias’ niece. Together, the couple had a daughter, Pythias, named after her mother.

Teaching

In 338 B.C., Aristotle went home to Macedonia to start tutoring King Phillip II’s son, the then 13-year-old Alexander the Great. Phillip and Alexander both held Aristotle in high esteem and ensured that the Macedonia court generously compensated him for his work.

In 335 B.C., after Alexander had succeeded his father as king and conquered Athens, Aristotle went back to the city. In Athens, Plato’s Academy, now run by Xenocrates, was still the leading influence on Greek thought. With Alexander’s permission, Aristotle started his own school in Athens, called the Lyceum. On and off, Aristotle spent most of the remainder of his life working as a teacher, researcher and writer at the Lyceum in Athens.

Because Aristotle was known to walk around the school grounds while teaching, his students, forced to follow him, were nicknamed the “Peripatetics,” meaning “people who travel about.” Lyceum members researched subjects ranging from science and math to philosophy and politics, and nearly everything in between.

Art was also a popular area of interest. Members of the Lyceum wrote up their findings in manuscripts. In so doing, they built the school’s massive collection of written materials, which by ancient accounts was credited as one of the first great libraries.

In the same year that Aristotle opened the Lyceum, his wife Pythias died. Soon after, Aristotle embarked on a romance with a woman named Herpyllis, who hailed from his hometown of Stagira. According to some historians, Herpyllis may have been Aristotle’s slave, granted to him by the Macedonia court. They presume that he eventually freed and married her. Regardless, it is known that Herpyllis bore Aristotle children, including one son named Nicomachus, after Aristotle’s father. Aristotle is believed to have named his famed philosophical work Nicomachean Ethics in tribute to his son.

When Aristotle’s former student Alexander the Great died suddenly in 323 B.C., the pro-Macedonian government was overthrown, and in light of anti-Macedonia sentiment, Aristotle was charge with impiety. To avoid being prosecuted, he left Athens and fled to Chalcis on the island of Euboea, where he would remain until his death.

Science

Although Aristotle was not technically a scientist by today’s definitions, science was among the subjects that he researched at length during his time at the Lyceum. Aristotle believed that knowledge could be obtained through interacting with physical objects. He concluded that objects were made up of a potential that circumstances then manipulated to determine the object’s outcome. He also recognized that human interpretation and personal associations played a role in our understanding of those objects.

Aristotle’s research in the sciences included a study of geology. He attempted, with some error, to classify animals into genera based on their similar characteristics. He further classified animals into species based on those that had red blood and those that did not. The animals with red blood were mostly vertebrates, while the “bloodless” animals were labeled cephalopods. Despite the relative inaccuracy of his hypothesis, Aristotle’s classification was regarded as the standard system for hundreds of years.

Marine biology was also an area of fascination for Aristotle. Through dissection, he closely examined the anatomy of marine creatures. In contrast to his geological classifications, his observations of marine life, as expressed in his books, are considerably more accurate.

As evidenced in his treatise Meteorology, Aristotle also dabbled in the earth sciences. By meteorology, Aristotle didn’t simply mean the study of weather. His more expansive definition of meteorology included “all the affectations we may call common to air and water, and the kinds and parts of the earth and the affectations of its parts.” In Meteorology, Aristotle identified the water cycle and discussed topics ranging from natural disasters to astrological events. Although many of his views on the Earth were controversial at the time, they were readopted and popularized during the late Middle Ages.

Philosophy

One of the main focuses of Aristotle’s philosophy was his systematic concept of logic. Aristotle’s objective was to come up with a universal process of reasoning that would allow man to learn every conceivable thing about reality. The initial process involved describing objects based on their characteristics, states of being and actions. In his philosophical treatises, Aristotle also discussed how man might next obtain information about objects through deduction and inference. To Aristotle, a deduction was a reasonable argument in which “when certain things are laid down, something else follows out of necessity in virtue of their being so.” His theory of deduction is the basis of what philosophers now call a syllogism, a logical argument where the conclusion is inferred from two or more other premises of a certain form.

In his book Prior Analytics, Aristotle explains the syllogism as “a discourse in which, certain things having been supposed, something different from the things supposed results of necessity because these things are so.” Aristotle defined the main components of reasoning in terms of inclusive and exclusive relationships. These sorts of relationships were visually grafted in the future through the use of Venn diagrams.

Aristotle’s philosophy not only provided man with a system of reasoning, but also touched upon ethics. In Nichomachean Ethics, he prescribed a moral code of conduct for what he called “good living.” He asserted that good living to some degree defied the more restrictive laws of logic, since the real world poses circumstances that can present a conflict of personal values. That said, it was up to the individual to reason cautiously while developing his or her own judgment.

Major Writings

Aristotle wrote an estimated 200 works, most in the form of notes and manuscript drafts. They consist of dialogues, records of scientific observations and systematic works. His student Theophrastus reportedly looked after Aristotle’s writings and later passed them to his own student Neleus, who stored them in a vault to protect them from moisture until they were taken to Rome and used by scholars there. Of Aristotle’s estimated 200 works, only 31 are still in circulation. Most date to Aristotle’s time at the Lyceum.

Aristotle’s major writings on logic include Categories, On Interpretation, Prior Analytics and Posterior Analytics. In them, he discusses his system for reasoning and for developing sound arguments.

Aristotle’s written work also discussed the topics of matter and form. In his book Metaphysics, he clarified the distinction between the two. To Aristotle, matter was the physical substance of things, while form was the unique nature of a thing that gave it its identity.

Nicomachean Ethics and Eudemian Ethics are Aristotle’s major treatises on the behavior and judgment that constitute “good living.” In Politics, Aristotle examined human behavior in the context of society and government.

Aristotle also composed a number of works on the arts, including Rhetoric, and science, including On the Heavens, which was followed by On the Soul, in which Aristotle moves from discussing astronomy to examining human psychology. Aristotle’s writings about how people perceive the world continue to underlie many principles of modern psychology.

Death and Legacy

In 322 B.C., just a year after he fled to Chalcis to escape prosecution under charges of impiety, Aristotle contracted a disease of the digestive organs and died. In the century following his passing, his works fell out of use, but were revived during the first century. Over time, they came to lay the foundation of more than seven centuries of philosophy. Solely regarding his influence on philosophy, Aristotle’s work influenced ideas from late antiquity all the way through the Renaissance. Aristotle’s influence on Western thought in the humanities and social sciences is largely considered unparalleled, with the exception of his teacher Plato’s contributions, and Plato’s teacher Socrates before him. The two-millennia-strong academic practice of interpreting and debating Aristotle’s philosophical works continues to endure.

Source : http://www.biography.com/people/aristotle-9188415?page=4

9:25 PM
0 Comments

Mind Philosopher

Jean-Paul Sartre~The Nobel Prize in Literature 1964

Dante : Biography

Confucius - Biography

Immanuel Kant

Friedrich Nietzsche

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel

René Descartes

Aristotle

MindTalk

About me

Followers

Total Pageviews

Geo Country

Flag Counter

Feedjit

Popular Posts

Labels

Blog Archive