Having studied with fellow German philosopher Martin Heidegger, Gadamer was in particular understandably heavily influenced by Heidegger’s interest in the “question of Being”. Heidegger sought to illuminate the ubiquitous and inexpressible nature of Being that underlies our human existence, where “Being” refers to the background that precedes, conditions, and then facilitates the strict human knowledge of science. Gadamer thus aimed to develop Heidegger’s commitment to the nature of Being, especially in regards to the connection with the nature of Being and the philosophies of Plato and Augustine. As such, let us first consider Pla... ... middle of paper ... ...nd distorting, they can also be positive and clarifying and open up new insights to the realities of texts. Consider how many insights have come to light through the various interpretations of Scripture, Plato’s dialogues, and Augustine’s doctrines.
Contemporary phenomenology has developed as a philosophy of new thinking-a phenomenology of life that can be applied in different ways toward solving various problems of intersubjectivity. Professor Theodors Celms (1893-1989) was the most prominent Latvian philosopher. He has published significant philosophical works in Latvian and German. His philosophical heritage is: "Der phânomenologische Idealismus Husserls", Riga, 1928; "Vom Wesen der Philosophie", Regensburg, 1930; "Lebensumgebung und Lebensprojektion", Leipzig, 1933; "Subjekt und Subjektivierung. Studien über das subjektive Sein", Riga, 1943.
The first explains the transition from everyday moral beliefs to the philosophy of those morals. The transition from popular moral philosophy to the metaphysics of morals is explained in Section II. Kant ends the book explaining how the metaphysics of morals is seen in everyday moral beliefs. In essence he forms a circle of reason, from common morals to philosophy, philosophy to metaphysics and metaphysics back to common morals. In the Introduction Marvin Fox explains three things to pay attention to when reading The Metaphysics of Morals.
William James Durant, a prominent American author, historian and philosopher, published The Story of Philosophy in 1926. He thought of philosophy as an all-encompassing study and endeavored the unification and humanization of all historical knowledge, which had grown too vast and had become infinitely categorized into miniscule specialties, in order to vitalize it for modern day use. Durant was a gifted writer of magnificent prose and also a storyteller who had harvested an incredible readership. His brilliant writing, which, rather than being dull, formal academic jargon, is witty and colorful, even catering to the senses. Durant’s publisher, Max Schuster, remarked that Durant's writing pleaded “to be read aloud”; it was also remarked that Durant’s fluid technique resulted in "prose so beautiful it rivals poetry.” Durant’s profoundly varied studies culminated in his authoring of a book that concerned the universal history of human philosophy.
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) produced two commonly recognised stages of thought in 20th century analytic philosophy, both of which are taken to be central and fundamental in their respective periods. His early philosophy in the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, first published in 1921, provided new insights into relationships between the world, thought, language and the nature of philosophy by showing the application of modern logic to metaphysics via language. His later philosophy, mostly found in Philosophical Investigations, published posthumously in 1953, controversially critiqued all traditional philosophy, including his own previous work. In this essay I will explain, contrast and evaluate both stages of his philosophy, highlighting strengths and weaknesses and concluding that Wittgenstein’s late philosophy has provided an interesting explanation for the meaning of language. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus evolved as a continuation of and reaction to Bertrand Russell and G Frege’s conceptions of logic, which Russell has left unexplained.
Or is there revealed in them, on the contrary, a plenitude, force, and will of life, its courage, certainty, future?" (17). These questions come about from Nietzsche's rejection of the Darwinian-Spencerian-utilitarian explanation of morality, characterized by his portrayal of the "English psychologist, " and serve as a framework in which he constructs the arguments in his book. The three essays that make up On The Genealogy of Morals each deal with a certain stage of cultural development of morality. In order to establish chronology, the second section should precede the first, as noted by Dennett (Darwin's Dangerous Idea, 1995) .
The paper will then proceed to offer a response to criticism on Nietzsche’s proposition. The text to be used is the second edition of ‘Existentialism: Basic Writings’ by Charles Guignon and Derk Pereboom. This book offers good rudimentary synopsis of the four major proponents of existentialism: Nietzsche, Heidegger, Sartre, and Kierkegaard, with excerpts from Husserl and Hegel aimed at giving a better explanation on the origin of existentialism. The author offers a simplified explanation on the various philosophical concepts by the philosophers mentioned above, making it easier to understand than would have been possible if one was reading the original works. The specific area of interest from the book is the area that covers Nietzsche’s Gay Science, as it offers insight on his concept of eternal recurrence.
Existentialism has been defined as a philosophical movement or tendency, emphasizing individual existence, freedom and choice that influences many diverse writers in the 19th and 20th centuries. The philosophical term existentialism came from Jean Paul Sartre, a French philosopher. He combined the theories of a select few German philosophers, the phenomenology of Edmund Husserl, the metaphysics of G.W.F. Hegel and Martin Heidegger, and the social theory of Karl Marx. This philosophy became a worldwide movement.
Existentialism is a Humanism, written by French philosopher Jean- Paul Sartre, was written in 1946 based on a lecture that Sartre gave at Club Maintenant in Paris in 1945. Existentialism is defined as “a philosophical theory or approach that emphasizes the existence of the individual person as a free and responsible agent determining their own development through acts of will” (Merriam- Webster Dictionary). In Existentialism is a Humanism, Sartre portrays existentialism as an essentially optimistic philosophy. He uses key existentialist terms such as anguish, abandonment, and despair to defend his view as well as provide examples that help us to analyze his claim. After doing so, we can conclude that Sartre’s claim is wrong and existentialism
The nineteenth century philosophers, Soren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, came to be seen as precursors of the movement. Existentialism was as much a literary phenomenon as a philosophical one. Sartre's own ideas were and are better known through his fictional works (such as Nausea and No Exit) than through his more purely philosophical ones (such as Being and Nothingness and Critique of Dialectical Reason), and the postwar years found a very diverse coterie of writers and artists linked under the term: retrospectively, Dostoevsky, Ibsen, and Kafka were conscripted; in Paris there were Jean Genet, André Gide, André Malraux, and the expatriate Samuel Beckett; the Norwegian Knut Hamsen and the Romanian Eugene Ionesco belong to the club; artists such as Alberto Giacommeti and even Abstract Expressionists such as Jackson Pollock, Arshile Gorky, and Willem de Kooning, and filmmakers such as Jean-Luc Godard and Ingmar Bergman were understood in existential terms. By the mid 1970s the cultural image of existentialism had become a cliché, parodized in countless books and films by Woody Allen. It is sometimes suggested, therefore, that existentialism just is this bygone cultural movement rather than an identifiable philosophical position; or, alternatively, that the term should be restricted to Sartre's philosophy alone.