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Central to this Stoic outlook is an understanding of what constitutes the good or most appropriate life for human beings. Whilst many thinkers might suppose health or wealth, the Stoics insist that the ultimate good must be good at all times. It is conceivable that wealth may be sometimes detrimental to me, and so too, even, health, if for example, my strength were put to ill-doing. Hence the Stoic conclusion that the only infallible good is virtue, which includes the usual list of Greco-Roman excellences: wisdom, justice, courage, and moderation.
‘Entia non sunt multiplicanda praeter necessitatem’
Is logic, as Arnauld would have it, merely a tool of clear thinking in order to aid rhetoric, or does it reflect universal laws of thought that correspond to reality? This latter view, to which Arnauld and the Port Royal logicians were hostile, holds that there are three laws of thought that are necessary principles for any rational creature, even God. These are the law of non-contradiction, the law of identity, and the law of the excluded middle. These state respectively that a proposition cannot be simultaneously asserted and denied; that if A is identical to B, then anything that is true of
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That which appears evil does so only because we lack the understanding to see the bigger picture,
Looks like what a Sith would quote.
If not every property of an individual is essential to a person’s identity, which, if any, are?
In the popular conundrum of whether a falling tree makes a sound when there is no one to hear it, Locke’s view would be that the falling tree creates vibrations in the air, but that there is no ‘sound’ strictly speaking, since sound is not a ‘real’ or primary quality. This view, sometimes called ‘scientific essentialism’, leads to the metaphysical conclusion, plausible to many modern thinkers, that without a perceiving mind, there is no such thing in the world as colour or sound, sweet or sour and so on; but there are really such things as shape, extension and solidity, independently of
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‘we ourselves are also among those entities we require to know, that we ourselves are the thing-in-itself’;
Schopenhasuer does not see the will as something to be glorified, but something to be resisted.
In music and the arts we can contemplate the universal will apart from our own individual strivings.
‘unintended consequences of intended action’ will be to the benefit of society at large.
The belief that ‘unintended consequences of intended action’ will be of benefit to society held great imaginative power over the industrial philanthropists of the 18th and 19th centuries and provided the philosophical groundwork for the later ethical theories of Bentham and Mill. However, criticism is not hard to come by. It is surely a blinkered view, if comforting for the entrepreneurial capitalist, to suppose that pursuing one’s own self-interest constitutes a magnanimous and philanthropic act towards society at large. One has only to review the social history of industrial Britain to
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According to Paine, all men are born with equal rights. The necessity of social living, however, can bring about situations where we impinge on the rights of others. Moreover, we may not always have the means to protect our rights from others who do not respect them. Consequently, it is necessary to develop the state and a constitution in which individual rights are encoded as civil rights, enforced by the state on behalf of the individual.
he argues that a state is predicated on the basis that it makes its citizens better off than they otherwise would be without its constitution. But, he finds, many of the poorest people in the civilized societies of Europe are in a worse state than the so-called ‘uncivilized’ native American Indians. The inequity has much to do with land and property ownership, a privilege Paine suggests should be taxed since the generation of wealth that makes it possible requires the support of society. The proceeds of land and property taxes should be invested in a welfare system, access to which is a right
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the belief in God is claimed to be intrinsically reasonable, a logical conclusion to the question of why anything exists at all. Paine rejects both organized religion and the Bible’s portrayal of a vindictive, vengeful God.
Bentham wove the principle – which he called the principle of utility – into the very fabric of philosophy, society and culture, popularising a system of ethics, known as ‘utilitarianism’,
He famously designed a prison, the ‘panopticon’, in which prisoners would at all times be visible to the authorities, and thus encouraged to naturally do what they ought to do, in other words, to promote the greatest good for the greatest number, in order to avoid pain.
the greatest problem faced by Bentham’s system, and to a certain extent one that even modern-day utilitarian theories have not fully resolved, is created by the subjugation of individuals to the good of the majority.
‘it is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be a Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied’.
we should only be concerned with morality in those aspects of life that require sanctions to deter specific kinds of conduct. Otherwise a person is morally and legally free to pursue their life as they see fit.
Mill nowhere suggests that we are at all times compelled to act for the good; only that when questions of right and wrong arise, what is right is what is good, and what is good is that which promotes the greatest happiness of all.
Comte was also the self-professed founder of sociology, familiar to sociology students the world over, and the first to apply the methods of science to the study of people and society.
Bergson rejects any kind of ‘teleological’ explanation of evolution, such as that found in Aristotle’s idea that everything is striving to fulfil a pre-ordained purpose. This sort of conception Bergson calls ‘inverse mechanism’ – the idea that everything is determined not by prior cause but by some future potentiality. Bergson rejects both as deterministic.
According to Peirce, the guiding principle of his ‘pragmaticist’ philosophy is ‘if one can define accurately all the conceivable experimental phenomena which the affirmation or denial of a concept could imply, one will have a complete definition of the concept’.
A belief, as Peirce understands it, is not some intellectual disposition to assent to a proposition, but a behavioural habit manifest in action. Accordingly, when real doubt ensues it disrupts our usual behavioural patterns.
James insists all knowledge is pragmatic – in other words, something is either true or right just insofar as it has a successful application to the world. Moreover, philosophical questions can be settled by attending to the difference competing answers would make to the lives of people who chose one option over another.
Since a life of religious belief has a positive effect of bringing discipline, motivating force and strength into our character, James considers that it does indeed have a pragmatic effect, to make our lives go better than if we do not believe.
Dewey upheld the idea that knowledge is a state of the human organism which consists in the settling of beliefs, understood as habits of behaviour that have proven successful in action. However, when habitual behaviour is disrupted by novel or unexpected experiences, the organism must engage in reasoning or ‘intellection’.
Societies, like individuals, are characterized by habitual patterns of action.
what is ethically ‘good’ is ‘a unified orderly release in action’ of conflicting tensions and impulses that arise out of moral conflicts. The good, like the true, is ultimately what works.
For Marx, the fundamental condition of humanity is the need to convert the raw material of the natural world into the goods necessary for survival. Consequently, production, or in other words economics, is the primary conditioning factor of life.
The more workers there are, the greater their strength as a force for revolution. The increasing size of the proletariat only hastens the advent of socialism.
Who guarantees that willingness to work shall suffice to obtain work, that uprightness, industry, thrift, and the rest of the virtues recommended by the bourgeoisie, are really his road to happiness? No one. He knows that he has something today and that it does not depend upon himself whether he shall have something tomorrow’.
in his European travels, Lenin had become exasperated by the endless controversies and petty arguments within the revolutionary movement and that it was this that persuaded him of the inefficacy of the democratic process.
Lenin writes, ‘To expect science to be impartial in a wage-slave society is as foolishly naïve as to expect impartiality from manufacturers on the question of whether workers’ wages ought not to be increased by decreasing the profits of capital.’
Jung went on to distinguish between a number of different personality types, and invented the terms ‘introvert’ and ‘extrovert’ to describe two of the most basic.
to be overly introvert or overly extrovert represents an immaturity in development.
Japan and Germany, two powerhouses of post-war world economics, both refrained from adopting Keynesian policies.
Choice is our starting point, constant companion, and heaviest burden.
One must choose to believe in God passionately and personally, not as a mere intellectual exercise. An authentic belief acquires its force from within, as a ‘leap of faith’ without the guidance of reason to reassure us that what we are doing is ‘right’ or ‘true’. Such reassurances, would, after all, maintains Kierkegaard, remove the need for faith if God’s existence were simply a matter of commonsense or rational reflection.
Going through the motions of a Christian life – attending church, following ordained ethical precepts, reciting scripture and so on – has nothing to do with the religious life if it does not involve a personal and direct confrontation with the divine.
Husserl is less concerned with scepticism about ‘knowledge of things’ and more with scepticism regarding ‘knowledge of self’.
Heidegger saw the history of philosophy as concerned with the wrong kind of questions. Ever since Plato, Heidegger complains, philosophers have been asking about what there is and what they can know about what there is. For Heidegger, these questions presuppose too much. They notoriously presuppose a number of dualisms, in particular the Cartesian one of subject and external world. Like Nietzsche, Heidegger rejects the division, rejects the notion of a world as external to some conscious spectator.
The central theme of all existentialist philosophies is the claim that ‘existence precedes essence’.
man first exists without purpose or definition, finds himself in the world and only then, as a reaction to experience, defines the meaning of his life.
Thus Sisyphus, who is condemned to eternal repetition and fully aware of it, finds that ‘the lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory’.
‘being aware of one’s life, and to the maximum, is living, and to the maximum’.
De Beauvoir insists that acting in bad faith presupposes that one is aware of the potential for freedom in one’s situation, which one then chooses to ignore. But the presence of this awareness is not a given.
The overall intent of Foucault’s work is to highlight how both what we take to be knowledge and the concepts through which we understand ourselves – such as ‘reason’, ‘normality’, ‘sexuality’ – are contingent, mutable and ‘ahistorical’. That is, they do not evolve along some ‘path of progress’ or represent a sustained development, but rather change in response to the needs of authority to control and regulate the behaviour of the individual.
in the evolution of societies from primitive to modern, there is a weakening of collective conscience and a move towards individualistic conscience.
According to Popper, the mark of a scientific theory is whether it makes predictions which could in principle serve to falsify it. The more predictions a theory makes, ‘the better it is’.
