I.

COURSE OUTLINE REPORT

A. PHILOSOPHIES: CONFUCIANISM, HINDUISM, BUDDHISM, SHINTOISM
A.1 Philosophy of Confucianism
 Is not a religion but a philosophy that is often said to be the foundation of modern
Chinese culture.
 Confucius- founder of the ideas of Confucianism
 He believed he knew how to bring peace to ancient China
 He created a moral structure for social life and politics that every person should follow
 GOLDEN RULE
 Confucianism is based on tradition and does not teach about one ruling God
Basic Ideas of Confucianism
 Each person has a place in society and they must accept their positions so that society can
function well
 China’s rulers are to be respected by the people as long as they are fair and care for the
people
 Family relationships are essential to having a good society and family respect was the
foundation of all ethics
 There are five basic types of relationships where one must understand their role of being
superior or inferior. They are:
o ruler and subject
o father and son
o husband and wife
o older brother and younger brother
o friend and friend
References:
1. See The Broken Covenant: American Civil Religion in a Time of Trial, New York: Seabury Press, 1975.
2. C. K. Yang, Religion in Chinese Society, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961, pp. 20-21.
3. Excerpted and adapted from de Bary, Sources, I: 115-16.
4. For a somewhat fuller philosophical (but readable) discussion, see Herbert Fingarette, Confucius -- The Secular as Sacred,
New York: Harper and Row, 1972, chapter one.

A.2 HINDUISM (On the Metaphysics & Philosophy of Hinduism Beliefs & Hindu Gods All
is One (Brahman)
 Largely practiced in India where over 80% of Indians claim to be Hindu
 Hinduism does not come from the teachings of one man. Hindus believe in many gods
and goddesses who are images of a single god.
 Each person’s karma, or good or bad behavior, determines his or her position in life
 The ultimate goal of Hindus is to achieve moksha, which is freedom from the cycle of
reincarnation.
 There is not one text the Hindus consider sacred, rather there are many texts like the
Vedas that teach Hindus proper behavior
 Hindus live by a caste system that divides people into classes
 A.3 BUDDHISM
 Originated in India and spread quickly
 The 4th largest religion in the world
 Siddhartha Gautama became the Buddha or “enlightened one” after spending time
pondering the ways of life
 He traveled all over India to share his newfound enlightenment with others and
developed a following devoted to his teachings
 Buddhists do not believe in a god, but rather follow the teachings of Buddha

BASIC IDEAS OF BUDDHISM

 The four Noble Truths are the basic instructions of Buddhism that teach that suffering
exists in the world and humans must reach the enlightenment of Buddha to rise above
them
 Tripitaka- - Holy Book of Buddha’s teachings
 Buddhists do not worship a god but rather Buddha by thanking him for his teachings
 Nirvana is the ultimate goal of Buddhists- It is a state of enlightenment where one can
have happiness and peace. It is often found through meditation
 Buddhists believe in reincarnation, a cycle of birth and rebirth, where one’s present life
determines what one becomes in the next life

A.4 SHINTOISM
 A religion unique to Japan
 Unlike other religions, it has not spread to other parts of the world
 Based on a traditional Japanese teaching that everything in nature consists of kami, or the
spirit of gods.

Basic Ideas of Shintoism

 Shintoists are expected to be reverent to nature, life, and birth
 Physical purity is more important than moral impurity
 Many Shintoists build shrines and worship their ancestors who they believe became kami
when they died
 Since Shinto offers no ideas of moral code or one God, many people who practice Shinto
also practice another religion such as Buddhism

B. PHILOSOPHERS: MAJOR CONTRIBUTIONS TO PHILOSOPHY

B.1 J.G. FICHTE
Johann Gottlieb Fichte is one of the major figures in German philosophy in the period
between Kant and Hegel. Initially considered one of Kant’s most talented followers, Fichte
developed his own system of transcendental philosophy, the so-called Wissenschaftslehre
(Breazeale, 1992). Through technical philosophical works and popular writings Fichte exercised
great influence over his contemporaries, especially during his years at the University of Jena. His
influence waned towards the end of his life, and Hegel’s subsequent dominance relegated Fichte
to the status of a transitional figure whose thought helped to explain the development of German
idealism from Kant’s Critical philosophy to Hegel’s philosophy of Spirit. Today, however, Fichte
is more correctly seen as an important philosopher in his own right, as a thinker who carried on
the tradition of German idealism in a highly original form. (Bowman, 2005)
Like Descartes and Kant before him, he was motivated by the problem of subjectivity and
consciousness. Fichte also wrote works of political philosophy and is considered one of the
fathers of German nationalism.(References: Bowman, Curtis. “Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Foundations of the Entire
Science of Knowledge.” In Central Works of Philosophy (Volume 3: The Nineteenth Century), ed. John Shand. Chesham: Acumen
Publishing Limited, 2005.
Foundations of Transcendental Philosophy (Wissenschaftslehre) nova methodo (1796/99). Trans. and ed. Daniel Breazeale. Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, 1992.)

B.2 F. NIETZSCHE
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844 - 1900) was a 19th Century German philosopher
and philologist. He is considered an important forerunner of Existentialism movement (although
he does not fall neatly into any particular school), and his work has generated an extensive
secondary literature within both the Continental Philosophy and Analytic Philosophy traditions of
the 20th Century.
He challenged the foundations of Christianity and traditional morality, famously asserting
that "God is dead", leading to (generally justified) charges of Atheism, Moral Skepticism,
Relativism and Nihilism. His original notions of the "will to power" as mankind's main
motivating principle, of the "Übermensch" as the goal of humanity, and of "eternal return" as a
means of evaluating ones life, have all generated much debate and argument among scholars.
He wrote prolifically and profoundly for many years under conditions of ill-health and
often intense physical pain, ultimately succumbing to severe mental illness. Many of his works
remain controversial and open to conflicting interpretations, and his uniquely provocative and
aphoristic writing style, and his non-traditional and often speculative thought processes have
earned him many enemies as well as great praise. His life-affirming ideas, however, have inspired
leading figures in all walks of cultural life, not just philosophy, especially in Continental Europe.

B.2 RENE DESCARTES

René Descartes (1596 - 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, scientist and
writer of the Age of Reason. He has been called the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of
subsequent Western philosophy can be seen as a response to his writings. He is responsible for
one of the best-known quotations in philosophy: "Cogito, ergo sum" ("I think, therefore I am").
He was a pioneer and major figure in 17th Century Continental Rationalism (often known
as Cartesianism) later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the
British Empiricist school of thought of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume. He represents a
major break with the Aristotelianism and Scholasticism of the Medieval period.
His contribution to mathematics was also of the first order, as the inventor of the
Cartesian coordinate system and the founder of analytic geometry, crucial to the invention of
calculus and mathematical analysis. He was also one of the key figures in the scientific revolution
of the 16th and 17th Centuries.

B.3 G. LEIBNITZ
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz or von Leibniz) (1646 - 1716) was a German
philosopher, mathematician, scientist and polymath of the Age of Reason.
As a philosopher, he was, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, a major figure
in the Continental Rationalism movement (the main 17th Century opposition to the British
Empiricist school of thought of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley and Hume). He devised his rather
eccentric metaphysical theory of monads operating in a pre-established divine harmony in order
to overcome what he saw as some of the drawbacks of the theories of Descartes and Spinoza. He
remained a devout Christian throughout his life and his formulation of the Problem of Evil in a
world created by a good God was an influential one.
His contributions to Logic were perhaps the most important between Aristotle and the
developments in modern formal Logic of the mid-19th Century, and to some extent he anticipated
modern Symbolic Logic.
He is equally important in the history of mathematics, as the inventor of calculus
(independently of Sir Isaac Newton), and as the discoverer of the binary system (the foundation
of virtually all modern computer architectures). He also made major contributions to physics, and
anticipated notions that surfaced much later in other sciences biology, medicine, geology,
probability theory, psychology, linguistics and information science, as well as writing on politics,
law, ethics, theology, history and philology.(References: Nery, M. Modern and Contemporary
Philosophy, 2010)

The Idealism of John Locke and Berkeley

B.4 JOHN LOCKE
John Locke (1632 - 1704) was an English philosopher of the Age of Reason and early
Age of Enlightenment. His ideas had enormous influence on the development of Epistemology
and Political Philosophy, and he is widely regarded as one of the most influential early
Enlightenment thinkers.
He is usually considered the first of the British Empiricists, the movement which
included George Berkeley and David Hume, and which provided the main opposition to the 17th
Century Continental Rationalists. He argued that all of our ideas are ultimately derived from
experience, and the knowledge of which we are capable is therefore severely limited in its scope
and certainty.
His Philosophy of Mind is often cited as the origin for modern conceptions of identity
and "the self". He also postulated, contrary to Cartesian and Christian philosophy, that the mind
was a "tabula rasa" (or "blank slate") and that people are born without innate ideas.
Along with Thomas Hobbes and Jean-Jacques Rousseau, he was also one of the
originators of Contractarianism (or Social Contract Theory), which formed the theoretical
groundwork of democracy, republicanism and modern Liberalism and Libertarianism. He is
sometimes referred to as the "Philosopher of Freedom", and his political views influenced both
the American and French Revolutions.

B.5 GEORGE BERKELEY

George Berkeley was born in Ireland. In 1707, he received a master’s degree from Trinity
College, Dublin. He became an Anglican bishop in Ireland in 1734.
Berkeley’s philosophical views are both extension of , and a reaction against those of
John Locke:
a. Berkeley shared Locke’s empiricist premise that the objects of human knowledge are
all “ideas”, either actually imprinted on the senses; or else such as are perceived by
attending to the passions and operations of the mind; or lastly, ideas formed by the
help of memory and imagination.
b. Berkeley’s idealism proposes a number of arguments showing that his collection of
ideas have all the features we attribute to ordinary objects. This account distinguishes
real from imaginary objects. A real object is just a collection of ideas which are
“more affecting, orderly, and distinct” and which are produced by some other spirit,
viz., God rather than by mind perceiving them.
c. Hid Concepts of “material substance” and “abstract ideas” are incompatible with
Locke’s view. He called this Immaterialism. There are no material existents. Nothing
exists except mind (finite spirits), the universal mind (God) and the mental content or
ideas by means of which God communicates with the finite spirits he created.

B.6. DAVID HUME

Hume was born in Edinburgh and studied at Edinburgh University. He was employed as a
private tutor, a librarian and a diplomat. He became famous after his death. Critics praise his “A
Treatise of Human Nature”.
a. There are no rational justifications to be given for our ordinary non-deductive
inferences. We make these inferences through the operation of a habit “custom”.
 b. Hume’s analysis of causation –one event causing another has a complex logical
structure. The earlier event “the cause” is of a type we find to be regularly followed
by events of the type of the effect, and that custom determines us to respect this
regular succession.
c. Clearer understanding of causal judgment and human freedom leads man to
recognize that all human actions are caused and that humans sometimes act freely.
Man possesses benevolence. It is the basis of each moral judgment.
d. Moral rules, especially those on justice, have utility for their basis. Morality for
Hume, is our obligations, standards of right and wrong conduct, and the meaning of
ethical concepts. It includes all those, which have a relation to human nature –
politics, history and ethics. Hume employs “moral” to mean “based on experience or
matters of fact.”
e. All knowledge comes from experience. If we have no direct experience of God,
custom is unable to operate. We have no basis for our inferences. Thus, religious
debates are futile.
Hume’s Main Points:
1. Hume believed that knowledge is limited to what is experienced; that is, sensory
impressions. Though he displays total skepticism in some passages, in most he
appears to be a modified skeptic who focuses on the nature of the self, causality,
induction, God, and the external world.
2. Hume’s epistemology rested on four assumptions:
(1) Every claim that something exists is a factual claim.
(2) Factual claims can be established only by observation or by causal inference from
what is observed.
(3) Thought, knowledge, belief, conception, judgment consist in having ideas,
(4) all of which are copies of impressions of sense or of inner feelings.
3. The quarter experiment. “The only existences, of which we are certain, are
perceptions.” Hume held, in his A Treatise of Human Nature, that we may observe a
conjunction or relation of cause and effect only between different perceptions and can
never observe it between perceptions and objects. Therefore, from the existence of
perceptions, we can never form any conclusion concerning the existence of objects.
4. Hume on the self. We have no experience of the self or mind, supposedly an
unchanging nonmaterial substance within us.
5. Hume on cause and effect. We have no experience of a cause actually producing an
effect; and even after we observe a frequent and constant conjunction between a
cause and its effect, there is no rational justification for supposing that that
conjunction will repeat itself in the future.
6. Hume: All reasoning based on present and past experience rests on the unprovable
assump-tion that the future will resemble the past: all inferences from experience
are only sup-positions. This leads to total skepticism. But even the total skeptic will
have his doubts!
(References from : PHILOSOPHY THE POWER OF IDEAS Seventh Edition Dan Barnett Butte College Brooke Noel Moore
Kenneth Bruder California State University, Chico Copyright © 2008, 2005, 2002, 1999, 1996, 1993, 1990 McGraw-Hill, Inc.)

PRAGMATISM: Charles Pierce, William James & John Dewey

B.7. CHARLES S. PIERCE
Charles Sanders Peirce (often known as C. S. Peirce) (1839 - 1914) was a 20th Century
American philosopher, logician, mathematician and scientist, and is considered among the
greatest of American minds.
He is best known as the founder of the largely American philosophical school of
Pragmatism, which was later popularized by his life-long friend William James and his one-time
student John Dewey, although his contributions to the development of modern Logic were also of
the first order.
He was largely ignored during his lifetime (secondary literature was scant until long after
World War II), and much of his huge output is still unpublished.
(References: Brent, J. 1993. Charles Sanders Peirce: A Life. (Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press).The definitive biography of
Peirce, it takes a warts-and-all approach to Peirce’s character and life, and attempts to show the relationship between the events of his
life, and his philosophical development.)

B.8 WILLIAM JAMES

William James is considered by many to be the most insightful and stimulating of
American philosophers, as well as the second of the three great pragmatists (the middle link
between Charles Sanders Peirce and John Dewey). As a professor of psychology and of
philosophy at Harvard University, he became the most famous living American psychologist and
later the most famous living American philosopher of his time. Avoiding the logically tight
systems typical of European rationalists, such as the German idealists, he cobbled together a
psychology rich in philosophical implications and a philosophy enriched by his psychological
expertise. More specifically, his theory of the self and his view of human belief as oriented
towards conscious action raised issues that required him to turn to philosophy. There he
developed his pragmatic epistemology, which considers the meaning of ideas and the truth of
beliefs not abstractly, but in terms of the practical difference they can make in people’s lives. He
explored the implications of this theory in areas of religious belief, metaphysics, human freedom
and moral values, and social philosophy. His contributions in these areas included critiques of
long-standing philosophical positions on such issues as freedom vs. determinism, correspondence
vs. coherence, and dualism vs. materialism, as well as a thorough analysis of a phenomenological
understanding of the self and consciousness, a “forward-looking” conception of truth (based on
validation and revisable experience), a thorough-going metaphysical pluralism, and a
commitment to a full view of agency in connection with communal and social concerns. Thus he
created one of the last great philosophical systems in Western thought, even if he did not live
quite long enough to complete every aspect of it. The combination of his provocative ideas and
his engaging writing style has contributed to the enduring impact of his work.
(References:Richard M. Gale, The Philosophy of William James: An Introduction. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005.)

B.9 JOHN DEWEY

John Dewey was a leading proponent of the American school of thought known as
pragmatism, a view that rejected the dualistic epistemology and metaphysics of modern
philosophy in favor of a naturalistic approach that viewed knowledge as arising from an active
adaptation of the human organism to its environment. On this view, inquiry should not be
understood as consisting of a mind passively observing the world and drawing from this ideas
that if true correspond to reality, but rather as a process which initiates with a check or obstacle to
successful human action, proceeds to active manipulation of the environment to test hypotheses,
and issues in a re-adaptation of organism to environment that allows once again for human action
to proceed. With this view as his starting point, Dewey developed a broad body of work
encompassing virtually all of the main areas of philosophical concern in his day. He also wrote
extensively on social issues in such popular publications as the New Republic, thereby gaining a
reputation as a leading social commentator of his time.
(References: Levine, Barbara. Works about John Dewey: 1886-1995. Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University
Press, 1996.)

B.10. IMMANUEL KANT

Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Konisberg (East Prussia – a major figure in the
history of philosophy). His greatest work is a classic in the field of epistemology and
metaphysics. It is called The Critique of the Pure Reason. He became professor at the University
of Konisberg. He sought to find alternatives to the continental rationalism of Descartes, Leibniz,
Spinoza, and the empiricist philosophy of David Hume, John Locke, and George Berkeley. Hegel
and Fichte created Kantianism or Kantism. Kant died in 1804 (Beck, 1990).
Kant believed that knowledge that was certain does exist and tried to show how this
couldbe possible given Hume’s arguments that indicate the opposite.
The ordering principles of the mind. Kant’s theory is sometimes known as the
Copernican revolution in philosophy; it meant that the fundamental properties or characteristics
of objects in the world outside the mind are due to our minds, not to the objects themselves.
For sensations to qualify as experience, they must be subject to spatial-temporal shaping
(the perceiving part of the mind must perceive them as objects existing outside us in space and
time) and they must also be conceptualized—brought under concepts.
Further, to qualify as experience, sensory stimulation must be connected together or
unified in a single, connected consciousness. Kant said his theory explained how it can be known
that no one will ever experience uncaused change: to qualify as experience in the first place, a
change must be subject to causation (that is, the mind “imposes” causation on experienced
change).
Kant: All knowledge begins with experience, but not all knowledge is derived from
experience. Hume believed that knowledge came from experience alone.
Things-in-themselves. But we cannot say that things as they are in themselves, as they are
independently of experience, must also conform to the principles and rules “imposed” by the
mind. We can only know “phenomena” or experienceable objects. We cannot know “noumena”
(things that exist outside experience). Skepticism is unavoidable as to the thing-in-itself (das
Ding-an-sich).
Relative to the world of experience, Kant was not a skeptic. Relative to things-in-
themselves, he was.

B.11. JOHANNA SCHOPENHAUER

Johanna Schopenhauer, (July 9, 1766 – April 17, 1838), was a German author. She is
today known primarily for being the mother of Arthur Schopenhauer.
Johanna Schopenhauer was born in Danzig to a family of wealthy merchants of Dutch
extraction. Her father, Christian Heinrich Trosiener, was also a senator in the city. At 18 years of
age she married Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, a rich merchant twenty years her senior. He was to
become the future father of her two children, Arthur and Adele Schopenhauer.
It was not long after her arrival in Weimar that Johanna began to publish her writings,
some articles on paintings with an emphasis on those by Jan van Eyck. In 1810, she published her
first book: a biography of her friend Fernow, who had died two years before. She wrote it with the
intention to pay his heirs' debts with his editor. As the book met with critical success, Johanna felt
stimulated to pursue a career as an author—a career on which her livelihood would depend, after
the aforementioned financial difficulties. First came the publication of her travelogues, which
were also acclaimed, and then of her fiction work, which, for a little more than a decade, made
her the most famous woman author in Germany. The following are her best known novels:
Gabriele (1819), Die Tante (1823) and Sidonia (1827).
(References Frost, Laura: Johanna Schopenhauer; ein Frauenleben aus der klassischen Zeit, Berlin 1905.)

The Utilitarianism: John S. Mill & Jeremy Bentham

B.12. JOHN S. MILL
John Stuart Mill was born in London. His father, James Mill, was a well-known
philosopher. John Mill studied Greek, Latin, the Classics, history, philosophy, logic and
mathematics. He was an art advocate taking special solace in the poetry of Wadsworth. His
contributions to philosophy and social thought are varied. He wrote: A System of Logic (1843),
An Examination for Sir William Hamilton’s Philosphy (1865), On Liberty; In Utilitarianism
(1861); Principles of Political Economy; Considerations on Representative Government (1861);
Augusto-Comte and Positivism (1865); The Sujection of Women (1869); and his Autobiography
(1873).
Mill’s moral philosophy is called UTILITARIANISM. Its fundamental principle is that
we should always perform those acts, which will bring the most happiness or, failing that, the
least unhappiness to the most people. The influence of Bentham is apparent in Mill’s Philosophy.
Throughout his life, Mill devoted himself to programs for social reform and founded a theoretical
justification for his political views and practices in the ethics of hedonism. Bentham had held that
the intensity of pleasure is the only criterion of its worth. For him, sublime moments of intellect
or sentiment were worth no more than equally intense moments of animal gratification. For Mill,
pleasures and of equal intensity could differ in worth. Anyone who has experienced both
pleasures of the brute and the pleasures of the civilized person will prefer the latter; and so the
civilized pleasures must be preferable. In short, Mill argues on the qualitative distinction
between “higher” and “lower” pleasures. Instead of advocating Bentham’s egoistic
utilitarianism, Mill’s ethical trend shifted to a universalistic or altruistic hedonism. This
transition from egoistic hedonism to altruistic hedonism stressed on the end of the human conduct
as the greatest happiness for the greatest number in terms of pleasure. As a psychological
hedonist, Mill both agrees and disagrees with Epicurus and Bentham. Albeit he affirms that we
are able to desire things other than pleasure – VIRTUE, for example -- he maintains that in
doing so we must consider these things to be a part of pleasure; hence, in desiring them we really
still desire only pleasure. Here, Mill attempted to reconcile his utilitarianism with the plurality of
values, which we possess (Sher, 1979).
(References:
Sher, George. John Stuart Mill: Utilitarianism Indianapolis: Hackett, 1979.
.Smart and Bernard Williams, Utlititarianism for and against, Cambridge, England; Cambridge
University Press, 1973)

B.13. JEREMY BENTHAM

Jeremy Bentham was an English philosopher and political radical. He is primarily known
today for his moral philosophy, especially his principle of utilitarianism, which evaluates
actions based upon their consequences. The relevant consequences, in particular, are the overall
happiness created for everyone affected by the action. Influenced by many enlightenment
thinkers, especially empiricists such as John Locke and David Hume, Bentham developed an
ethical theory grounded in a largely empiricist account of human nature. He famously held a
hedonistic account of both motivation and value according to which what is fundamentally
valuable and what ultimately motivates us is pleasure and pain. Happiness, according to
Bentham, is thus a matter of experiencing pleasure and lack of pain.
Although he never practiced law, Bentham did write a great deal of philosophy of law,
spending most of his life critiquing the existing law and strongly advocating legal reform.
Throughout his work, he critiques various natural accounts of law which claim, for example, that
liberty, rights, and so on exist independent of government. In this way, Bentham arguably
developed an early form of what is now often called “legal positivism.” Beyond such critiques,
he ultimately maintained that putting his moral theory into consistent practice would yield results
in legal theory by providing justification for social, political, and legal institutions.
Bentham’s influence was minor during his life. But his impact was greater in later years
as his ideas were carried on by followers such as John Stuart Mill, John Austin, and other
consequentialists. (References: Halévy, Elie. La formation du radicalisme philosophique, 3 vols. Paris, 1904 [The Growth of
Philosophic Radicalism. Tr. Mary Morris. London: Faber & Faber, 1928.]).

B.14. NICCOLO MACHIAVELLI

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (1469 - 1527) was an Italian philosopher, political
theorist, diplomat, musician and writer of the Renaissance period. He was a central figure in the
political scene of the Italian Renaissance, a tumultuous period of plots, wars between city states
and constantly shifting alliances.
Although he never considered himself a philosopher (and often overtly rejected
philosophical inquiry as irrelevant), many subsequent political philosophers have been influenced
by his ideas. His name has since passed into common usage to refer to any political move that is
devious or cunning in nature, although this probably represents a more extreme view than
Machiavelli actually took.
He is best known today for two main works, the well-known "The Prince" (a treatise on
political realism and a guide on how a ruler can retain control over his subjects), and the
"Discourses on Livy" (the most important work on republicanism in the early modern period).

Although he is sometimes presented as a model of Moral Nihilism, that is actually

highly questionable as he was largely silent on moral matters and, if anything, he presented an
alternative to the ethical theories of his day, rather than an all-out rejection of all morality. He was
also accused of Atheism, again with little justification.
(References: http://www.philosophybasics.com/philosophers_machiavelli.html)

B.15. JEAN JACQUES ROUSSEAU

Jean-Jacques Rousseau was one of the most influential thinkers during the Enlightenment
in eighteenth century Europe. His first major philosophical work, A Discourse on the Sciences
and Arts, was the winning response to an essay contest conducted by the Academy of Dijon in
1750. In this work, Rousseau argues that the progression of the sciences and arts has caused the
corruption of virtue and morality. This discourse won Rousseau fame and recognition, and it laid
much of the philosophical groundwork for a second, longer work, The Discourse on the Origin
of Inequality. The second discourse did not win the Academy’s prize, but like the first, it was
widely read and further solidified Rousseau’s place as a significant intellectual figure. The central
claim of the work is that human beings are basically good by nature, but were corrupted by
the complex historical events that resulted in present day civil society. Rousseau’s praise of
nature is a theme that continues throughout his later works as well, the most significant of which
include his comprehensive work on the philosophy of education, the Emile, and his major work
on political philosophy, The Social Contract: both published in 1762. These works caused great
controversy in France and were immediately banned by Paris authorities. Rousseau fled France
and settled in Switzerland, but he continued to find difficulties with authorities and quarrel with
friends. The end of Rousseau’s life was marked in large part by his growing paranoia and his
continued attempts to justify his life and his work. This is especially evident in his later books,
The Confessions, The Reveries of the Solitary Walker, and Rousseau: Judge of Jean-Jacques.
Rousseau greatly influenced Immanuel Kant’s work on ethics. His novel Julie or the New
Heloise impacted the late eighteenth century’s Romantic Naturalism movement, and his political
ideals were championed by leaders of the French Revolution.
(References:
Discours sur les Sciences et les Arts (Discourse on the Sciences and Arts), 1750.
Often referred to as the “First Discourse,” this work was a submission to the Academy of
Dijon’s essay contest, which it won, on the question, “Has the restoration of the sciences and arts
tended to purify morals?”)

B.16. THOMAS HOBBES

The English philosopher Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679) is best known for his political
thought, and deservedly so. His vision of the world is strikingly original and still relevant to
contemporary politics. His main concern is the problem of social and political order: how human
beings can live together in peace and avoid the danger and fear of civil conflict. He poses stark
alternatives: we should give our obedience to an unaccountable sovereign (a person or group
empowered to decide every social and political issue). Otherwise what awaits us is a “state of
nature” that closely resembles civil war – a situation of universal insecurity, where all have reason
to fear violent death and where rewarding human cooperation is all but impossible.
One controversy has dominated interpretations of Hobbes. Does he see human beings as
purely self-interested or egoistic? Several passages support such a reading, leading some to think
that his political conclusions can be avoided if we adopt a more realistic picture of human nature.
However, most scholars now accept that Hobbes himself had a much more complex view of
human motivation. A major theme below will be why the problems he poses cannot be avoided
simply by taking a less “selfish” view of human nature.
(References: Edwards, Alistair (2002) “Hobbes” in Interpreting Modern Political Philosophy:
From Machiavelli to Marx, eds. A Edwards and J Townshend (Palgrave Macmillan, Houndmills)

B.17. BENEDICT SPINOZA

Benedict de Spinoza was among the most important of the post-Cartesian philosophers
who flourished in the second half of the 17th century. He made significant contributions in
virtually every area of philosophy, and his writings reveal the influence of such divergent
sources as Stoicism, Jewish Rationalism, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Descartes, and a variety of
heterodox religious thinkers of his day. For this reason he is difficult to categorize, though he is
usually counted, along with Descartes and Leibniz, as one of the three major Rationalists. Given
Spinoza’s devaluation of sense perception as a means of acquiring knowledge, his description of a
purely intellectual form of cognition, and his idealization of geometry as a model for philosophy,
this categorization is fair. But it should not blind us to the eclecticism of his pursuits, nor to the
striking originality of his thought.
Among philosophers, Spinoza is best known for his Ethics, a monumental work that
presents an ethical vision unfolding out of a monistic metaphysics in which God and Nature are
identified. God is no longer the transcendent creator of the universe who rules it via providence,
but Nature itself, understood as an infinite, necessary, and fully deterministic system of which
humans are a part. Humans find happiness only through a rational understanding of this system
and their place within it. On account of this and the many other provocative positions he
advocates, Spinoza has remained an enormously controversial figure. For many, he is the
harbinger of enlightened modernity who calls us to live by the guidance of reason. For others, he
is the enemy of the traditions that sustain us and the denier of what is noble within us. After a
review of Spinoza’s life and works, this article examines the main themes of his philosophy,
primarily as they are set forth in the Ethics.
(References: Spinoza Opera. 4 Vols. Edited by Carl Gebhart. (Heidelberg: Carl Winter, 1925).
Standard critical edition of Spinoza’s writings and correspondence in Latin and Dutch.)

B.18. SOREN KIERKEGAARD

Søren Kierkegaard is an outsider in the history of philosophy. His peculiar authorship
comprises a baffling array of different narrative points of view and disciplinary subject matter,
including aesthetic novels, works of psychology and Christian dogmatics, satirical prefaces,
philosophical “scraps” and “postscripts,” literary reviews, edifying discourses, Christian
polemics, and retrospective self-interpretations. His arsenal of rhetoric includes irony, satire,
parody, humor, polemic and a dialectical method of “indirect communication” – all designed to
deepen the reader’s subjective passionate engagement with ultimate existential issues. Like his
role models Socrates and Christ, Kierkegaard takes how one lives one’s life to be the prime
criterion of being in the truth. Kierkegaard’s closest literary and philosophical models are Plato,
J.G. Hamann, G.E. Lessing, and his teacher of philosophy at the University of Copenhagen Poul
Martin Møller, although Goethe, the German Romantics, Hegel, Kant and the logic of Adolf
Trendelenburg are also important influences. His prime theological influence is Martin Luther,
although his reactions to his Danish contemporaries N.F.S. Grundtvig and H.L. Martensen are
also crucial. In addition to being dubbed “the father of existentialism,” Kierkegaard is best known
as a trenchant critic of Hegel and Hegelianism and for his invention or elaboration of a host of
philosophical, psychological, literary and theological categories, including: anxiety, despair,
melancholy, repetition, inwardness, irony, existential stages, inherited sin, teleological suspension
of the ethical, Christian paradox, the absurd, reduplication, universal/exception, sacrifice, love as
a duty, seduction, the demonic, and indirect communication.
(References: Garff, Joakim, SAK: Søren Aabye Kierkegaard: en biografi, Copenhagen: Gad, 2000)

B.19. JEAN PAUL SARTRE

The philosophical career of Jean Paul Sartre (1905-1980) focuses, in its first phase, upon
the construction of a philosophy of existence known as existentialism. Sartre’s early works are
characterized by a development of classic phenomenology, but his reflection diverges from
Husserl’s on methodology, the conception of the self, and an interest in ethics. These points of
divergence are the cornerstones of Sartre’s existential phenomenology, whose purpose is to
understand human existence rather than the world as such. Adopting and adapting the methods of
phenomenology, Sartre sets out to develop an ontological account of what it is to be human. The
main features of this ontology are the groundlessness and radical freedom which characterize the
human condition. These are contrasted with the unproblematic being of the world of things.
Sartre’s substantial literary output adds dramatic expression to the always unstable co-existence
of facts and freedom in an indifferent world.
Sartre’s ontology is explained in his philosophical masterpiece, Being and Nothingness,
where he defines two types of reality which lie beyond our conscious experience: the being of the
object of consciousness and that of consciousness itself. The object of consciousness exists as
“in-itself,” that is, in an independent and non-relational way. However, consciousness is always
consciousness “of something,” so it is defined in relation to something else, and it is not possible
to grasp it within a conscious experience: it exists as “for-itself.” An essential feature of
consciousness is its negative power, by which we can experience “nothingness.” This power is
also at work within the self, where it creates an intrinsic lack of self-identity. So the unity of the
self is understood as a task for the for-itself rather than as a given.
In order to ground itself, the self needs projects, which can be viewed as aspects of an
individual’s fundamental project and motivated by a desire for “being” lying within the
individual’s consciousness. The source of this project is a spontaneous original choice that
depends on the individual’s freedom. However, self’s choice may lead to a project of self-
deception such as bad faith, where one’s own real nature as for-itself is discarded to adopt that of
the in-itself. Our only way to escape self-deception is authenticity, that is, choosing in a way
which reveals the existence of the for-itself as both factual and transcendent. For Sartre, my
proper exercise of freedom creates values that any other human being placed in my situation
could experience, therefore each authentic project expresses a universal dimension in the
singularity of a human life.
(References: Christian J. OnofEmail: c.onof@imperial.ac.ukUniversity College, London, United Kingdom, 2010)

B.20. ALBERT CAMUS

Albert Camus was a French-Algerian existentialist. He was a journalist, playwright,
novelist, writer of philosophical essays, and Nobel laureate. Though neither by advanced training
nor profession a philosopher, Camus nevertheless through his literary works and in numerous
reviews, articles, essays, and speeches made important, forceful contributions to a wide range of
issues in moral philosophy – from terrorism and political violence to suicide and the death
penalty. In awarding him its prize for literature in 1957, the Nobel committee cited the author’s
persistent efforts to “illuminate the problem of the human conscience in our time,” and it is pre-
eminently as a writer of conscience and as a champion of imaginative literature as a vehicle of
philosophical insight and moral truth that Camus was honored by his own generation and is still
admired today. He was at the height of his career, at work on an autobiographical novel, planning
new projects for theatre, film, and television, and still seeking a solution to the lacerating political
turmoil in his native Algeria, when he died tragically in an automobile accident in January, 1960.

Philosophy
“More a writer than a philosopher.”
(Assessment penciled on Camus’ dissertation by his dissertation adviser.)
To re-emphasize a point made earlier, Camus considered himself first and foremost a
writer (un ecrivain). And at various times in his career he also accepted the labels journalist,
humanist, novelist, and even moralist. However, he apparently never felt comfortable identifying
himself as a philosopher – a term he seems to have associated with rigorous academic training,
systematic thinking, logical consistency, and a coherent, carefully defined doctrine or body of
ideas.
This is not to suggest that Camus lacked ideas or to say that his thought cannot be
considered a personal philosophy. It is simply to point out that he was not a systematic, or even a
notably disciplined, thinker and that, unlike Heidegger and Sartre, for example, he showed very
little interest in metaphysics and ontology (which seems to be one of the reasons he consistently
denied that he was an existentialist). In short, he was not much given to speculative philosophy or
any kind of abstract theorizing. His thought is instead nearly always related to current events
(e.g., the Spanish War, revolt in Algeria) and is consistently grounded in down-to-earth moral and
political reality.
Camus is often classified as an existentialist writer, and it is easy to see why. Affinities
with Kierkegaard and Sartre are patent. He shares with these philosophers (and with the other
major writers in the existentialist tradition, from Augustine and Pascal to Dostoyevsky and
Nietzsche) an habitual and intense interest in the active human psyche, in the life of conscience or
spirit as it is actually experienced and lived. Like these writers, he aims at nothing less than a
thorough, candid exegesis of the human condition, and like them he exhibits not just a
philosophical attraction but also a personal commitment to such values as individualism, free
choice, inner strength, authenticity, personal responsibility, and self-determination.
However, one troublesome fact remains: throughout his career Camus repeatedly denied
that he was an existentialist. Was this an accurate and honest self-assessment? On the one hand,
some critics have questioned this “denial” (using the term almost in its modern clinical sense),
attributing it to the celebrated Sartre-Camus political “feud” or to a certain stubbornness or even
contrariness on Camus’ part. In their view, Camus qualifies as, at minimum, a closet existentialist,
and in certain respects (e.g., in his unconditional and passionate concern for the individual) as an
even truer specimen of the type than Sartre himself.
On the other hand, besides his personal rejection of the label, there appear to be solid
reasons for challenging the claim that Camus is an existentialist. For one thing, it is noteworthy
that he never showed much interest in (indeed he largely avoided) metaphysical and ontological
questions (the philosophical raison d’etre and bread and butter of Heidegger and Sartre). Of
course there is no rule that says an existentialist must be a metaphysician. However, Camus’
seeming aversion to technical philosophical discussion does suggest one way in which he
distanced himself from contemporary existentialist thought.
Another point of divergence is that Camus seems to have regarded existentialism as a
complete and systematic world-view, that is, a fully articulated doctrine. In his view, to be a true
existentialist one had to commit to the entire doctrine (and not merely to bits and pieces of it), and
this was apparently something he was unwilling to do.
Yet a further point of separation, and possibly a decisive one, is that Camus actively
challenged and set himself apart from the existentialist motto that being precedes essence.
Ultimately, against Sartre in particular and existentialists in general, he clings to his instinctive
belief in a common human nature. In his view human existence necessarily includes an essential
core element of dignity and value, and in this respect he seems surprisingly closer to the humanist
tradition from Aristotle to Kant than to the modern tradition of skepticism and relativism from
Nietzsche to Derrida (the latter his fellow-countryman and, at least in his commitment to human
rights and opposition to the death penalty, his spiritual successor and descendant).
(References: Barthes, Roland. Writing Degree Zero. New York: Hill and Wang, 1968.; Bloom,
Harold, ed. Albert Camus. New York: Chelsea House, 1989.; Brée, Germaine. Camus. New
Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1961.; Brée, Germaine, ed. Camus: A Collection of
Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1962.;Cruickshank, John. Albert Camus and
the Literature of Revolt. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.;Cruickshank, John. The
Novelist as Philosopher. London: Oxford University Press, 1959.; Kauffman, Walter, ed. Religion
from Tolstoy to Camus. New York: Harper, 1964.;Lottman, Herbert R. Albert Camus: A
Biography. Corte Madera, CA: Gingko Press, 1997.; Malraux, Andre. Anti-Memoirs. New York:
Holt, Rinehart, and Winston, 1968.;; Thrody, Philip. Albert Camus, 1913-1960. London: Hamish
Hamilton, 1961.; Sartre, Jean-Paul. “Camus’ The Outsider.” In Situations. New York: George
Braziller, 1965.;Todd, Olivier. Albert Camus : A Life. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1997.)

B.21. GOTTLIEB FREGE

Gottlob Frege was a German logician, mathematician and philosopher who played a
crucial role in the emergence of modern logic and analytic philosophy. Frege’s logical works were
revolutionary, and are often taken to represent the fundamental break between contemporary
approaches and the older, Aristotelian tradition. He invented modern quantificational logic, and
created the first fully axiomatic system for logic, which was complete in its treatment of
propositional and first-order logic, and also represented the first treatment of higher-order logic.
In the philosophy of mathematics, he was one of the most ardent proponents of logicism, the
thesis that mathematical truths are logical truths, and presented influential criticisms of rival
views such as psychologism and formalism. His theory of meaning, especially his distinction
between the sense and reference of linguistic expressions, was groundbreaking in semantics and
the philosophy of language. He had a profound and direct influence on such thinkers as Russell,
Carnap and Wittgenstein. Frege is often called the founder of modern logic, and he is sometimes
even heralded as the founder of analytic philosophy.
Frege was an ardent proponent of logicism, the view that the truths of arithmetic are
logical truths. Perhaps his most important contributions to the philosophy of mathematics were
his arguments for this view. He also presented significant criticisms against rival views. We have
seen that Frege was a harsh critic of psychologism in logic. He thought similarly about
psychologism in mathematics. Numbers cannot be equated with anyone’s mental images, nor
truths of mathematics with psychological truths. Mathematical truths are objective, not
subjective. Frege was also a critic of Mill’s view that arithmetical truths are empirical truths,
based on observation. Frege pointed out that it is not just observable things that can be counted,
and that mathematical truths seem to apply also to these things. On Mill’s view, numbers must be
taken to be conglomerations of objects. Frege rejects this view for a number of reasons. Firstly, is
one conglomeration of two things the same as a different conglomeration of two things, and if
not, in what sense are they equal? Secondly, a conglomeration can be seen as made up of a
different number of things, depending on how the parts are counted. One deck of cards contains
fifty two cards, but each card consists of a multitude of atoms. There is no one uniquely
determined “number” of the whole conglomeration. He also reiterated the arguments of others:
that mathematical truths seem apodictic and knowable a priori. He also argued against the
Kantian view that arithmetic truths are based on the pure intuition of the succession of time. His
main argument against this view, however, was simply his own work in which he showed that
truths about the nature of succession and sequence can be proven purely from the axioms of logic.
(References: Kevin C. Klement Email: klement@philos.umass.edu University of Massachusetts, Amherst U. S. A.)
B.22. BERTRAND RUSSEL
Bertrand Russell was trained as Cambridge Platonist or British Idealists following
Bradley’s adaptation of Hegel’s philosophy. He doubted the meaningfulness of metaphysical
abstractions. He analyzed the syntactic and semantic meaning of all linguistic utterances. Russell
concentrated on logic and the idealist principle’s consequences for mathematics. He proposed a
solution to the philosophical problem by endorsing the use of natural sciences’ methodology
using symbolic logic. Russell presented through his theory of descriptions and his theory of types
that the logic of ordinary language is misleading with respect to what there is in the world and
what can be said to be meaningful. As a solution Russell proposed LOGICAL ATOMISM.
Russell’s Logical Atomism is an integrated metaphysical theory of his earlier thesis of
logic, semantics and epistemology. It was designed as an account of the relation between
language and reality that clarifies the one-to-one correspondence between the basic atomic facts
that comprises the world and the simple propositions affirming them.
The basic idea is that the structure of the world is precisely isomorphic with the structure
of a logically perfect language. Obviously, on the structure of language, we explore and discover
the ultimate structure of the world. In such a language, it corresponds to one and only one name.
At the basic sentential sphere there would be atomic propositions, corresponding to atomic facts.
The configurations of atomic propositions from objects of acquaintance are of two
forms:
1. A particular possessing a property.
2. A relation between particulars.

All other propositions are truth functions of atomic propositions. Logical atomism affirms
a correspondence theory of truth: An atomic proposition is true it corresponds to an actual
situation in the world; a complex/molecular proposition’s truth is a function of the truth values
of the atomic propositions from which it is a composite of. Thus, “p or q” is true if at least one of
p or q is true.

B.23. LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN

Ludwig Wittgenstein is one of the most important philosophers of the 20 th century. He
was born in Vienna in 1889. He studied aeronautical engineering at the University of Manchester,
then, philosophy at Cambridge University. With the outbreak of the war, he wrote TRactatus-
Logico Philosophicus. After the war, he abandoned philosophy to become a village school teacher
in rural Austria for six years. He then moved to Vienna and became acquainted with Moriz
Schlick and his associates in the “Vienna Circle”. In 1929, he returned to Cambridge, received a
Ph.D degree and once again embarked on a career in philosophy. He lectured in philosophy at
Cambridge from 1930 until 1947. During World War II, he worked in various British hospitals.
Then, he returned to rural Ireland to live in seclusion and write the Philosophical Investigations.
He died in 1951.
There are two philosophical Wittgensteins. The “early” Wittgensteins developed a theory
of the world called “Logical Atomism”. This theory, influenced by his own work in
mathematical logical as well as the thoughts of Russell, has much in common with the
Philosophy of logical positivism, later developed by the members of the Vienna circle. It received
its expressions in the TRactatus, which was published in 1921.
(References: Pitcher, A. The Philosophy of Wittgenstein. Englewood Cliffs, N.J, Prentice Hall, 1964) A Synopsis of Wittgenstein
Philosophy.)

B.24. HENRI BERGSON

Bergson was concerned with time. Conceptualized time is a straight libe with moments
as its points; experienced time is duration, not a succession of moments, and it flows in an
indivisible continuity. Its phases melt into one another and form an organic whole.
 He expounded a nonmechanistic portrait of biological evolution, propelled toward higher
levels of organization by an inner vital impulse. He carried this processive approach on morality
wherein he distinguished between static and dynamic morality. Static is a morality of obligation.
Behavior is sanctioned by an ordered community. Dynamic is a morality of attraction issuing
from mystical experience. The vital impulse, which is communicated from God to others through
the mystic, generates a dynamic morality guided by a vision of humanity as a a whole.
(Nery,M.2010).

B.25 MAURICE MERLEAU-PONTY

Maurice Merleau-Ponty is in the same philosophical tradition as Husserl. His rallying cry,
is “BACK TO THE THINGS”, or “BACK TO PERCEPTION”. The human person is
essentially a “being-in-the-word”. We are embodied spirits. Merleau-Ponty philosophy is a
middle way between empiricism and intellectualism, between realism (a philosophical view
which emphasizes the objectivity of things apart from the person thinking about them) and
subjectivism, and between determinism and the Sartrean conception of absolute freedom. We are
born into a social situation, he says, which in large part determines how we act and what we see.
We are not wholly free to throw off our historically and socially conditioned self. On the other
hand, our social situation does not wholly determine our modes of action, any more than the
ready-made meanings we encounter in the things around us entirely determine what meanings we
shall find in them. (Nery, 2010).
(References: Nery, Maria Imelda Nabor, Modern and Contemporary Philosophy, National
Bookstore.,Mandaluyong City)

B.26. ALBERT EINSTEIN (The Scientist, The Philosopher, The Moralist, The Man
Born in Ulm, Germany in 1879, Albert Einstein is still considered one of the greatest
scientific and mathematical geniuses in history. In 1905, at the age of 26, he set forth his theory of
relativity which discards the concept of time and space as absolute entities, and views them as
relative to moving frames of reference. At the same time, he postulated light quanta or photons,
comparable to energy quanta, and on these based his explanation of the photoelectric effect. In
1911, he asserted the equivalence of gravitation and inertia. In 1916, he completed the
mathematical formulation of his general theory of relativity, which included gravitation as a
determiner of curvature of space-time continuum and represented gravitation as a field rather than
a force. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for his contributions to theoretical physics, especially for
his work on the photoelectric effect. In 1950, he presented his unified field theory, which attempts
to explain gravitation, electromagnetism, and subatomic phenomena in one set of laws. He
completed its mathematical formulation in 1953, just two years before his death in 1955 at the
age of 76.
Such incredible accomplishments for one individual! Yet, Einstein wrote in an essay
entitled, SELF PORTRAIT, "For the most part, I do the thing which my own nature drives me to
do. It is embarrassing to earn so much respect and love for it.” Schopenhauer’s saying “A man
can do as he will, but not will as he will,” an inspiration to Einstein since his youth, seemed to
express the basis of his humility. So what was the nature, the will, of the man himself? We can
learn much about Albert Einstein, the person, from THE WORLD AS I SEE IT and OUT OF MY
LATER YEARS, two books he wrote shortly before his death.
Philosophy? Yes, Albert Einstein, the greatest scientist and mathematician of the
twentieth century, studied philosophy. He felt deeply that science, mathematics and technology
not only needed to be balanced with philosophy, ethics, spirituality, and the arts, but that they
were merely “different branches of the same tree”. He said, "All religions, arts and sciences are
directed toward ennobling man's life, lifting it from the sphere of mere physical existence
and leading the individual toward freedom.” He felt it no mere chance that universities
originally developed from clerical schools. “Both churches and universities - insofar as they
live up to their true function - serve the ennoblement of the individual. They seek to fulfill
this great task by spreading moral and cultural understanding, renouncing the use of brute
force,” he explained. “Man owes his strength in the struggle for existence to the fact that he
is a social living animal. As little as a battle between single ants of an ant hill is essential for
survival, just so little is this the case with the individual members of a human community.”
Present world leaders could benefit from this profound truth!
In THE RELIGIOUSNESS OF SCIENCE, he wrote, “The scientist is possessed by the
sense of universal causation. The future, to him, is every whit as necessary and determined as the
past. There is nothing divine about morality; it is a purely human affair. His religious feeling
takes the form of a rapturous amazement at the harmony of natural law, which reveals an
intelligence of such superiority that compared with it, all the systemic thinking and acting of
human beings is an utterly insignificant reflection. This feeling is the guiding principle of his life
and work, insofar as he succeeds in keeping himself from the shackles of selfish desire. It is
beyond question closely akin to that which has possessed the religious geniuses of all ages.”
Einstein said the laws of science and the laws of ethics are basically one and the same.
Using the example of the question “Why should we not lie?”, he explains, “Lying destroys
confidence in the statements of other people. Without such confidence, social cooperation is made
impossible or at least difficult. Such cooperation, however, is essential to make human life
possible and tolerable. This means that the rule ‘Thou shalt not lie’ has been traced back to the
demands ‘Human life shall be preserved’ and ‘Pain and sorrow shall be lessened as much as
possible’.”
He explains his view of morality in MORALS AND EMOTIONS. “If man as individuals
surrender to the call of their elementary instincts, avoiding pain and seeking satisfaction only for
their own selves, the result for them all taken together must be a state of insecurity, fear, and
promiscuous misery. If they use their intelligence from an individualist, selfish standpoint,
building up their life on the illusion of a happy, unattached existence, things will be hardly
better.” He felt all moral teaching should involve principles that, by following, there should
“accrue to all as great a measure as possible of security and satisfaction and as small a measure as
possible of suffering.” He went on to say that moral teaching “is not a matter for church and
religion alone, but the most precious traditional possession of all mankind.”
Einstein was passionate about the ethical treatment of individuals who are different,
perhaps because as a child he was so different from other children and so discriminated against.
Even in his prime, he required 12 hours of sleep a night, a handicapping condition in our work-
oriented society. He wrote, “We must not only tolerate differences between individuals and
between groups, but we should indeed welcome them and look upon them as an enriching of our
existence. Without tolerance in this widest sense, there can be no question of true morality.”
In GOOD AND EVIL, he wrote, “A man’s value to the community depends on primarily
on how far his feelings, thoughts, and actions are directed towards promoting the good of his
fellows. We call him good or bad according to how he stands in the matter. It looks at first as if
our estimate of a man depends entirely on his social qualities. And yet, such an attitude would be
wrong. It is clear that all the valuable things, material, spiritual, and moral, which we receive
from society can be traced back through countless generations to certain creative individuals. The
use of fire, the cultivation of edible plants, the steam engine - each was discovered by one man.
Only the individual can think, and thereby create new values for society - nay, even set up new
moral standards to which life of the community conforms. Without creative, independently
thinking and judging personalities, the upward development of society is as unthinkable as the
development of the individual personality without the nourishing soil of the community.”
“Moral conduct does not mean merely a stern demand to renounce some of the desired
joys of life, but rather a sociable interest in a happier lot for all men,” he continued. “This
conception implies one requirement above all - that every individual should have the opportunity
to develop the gifts which may be latent in him. Only then can the individual obtain the
satisfaction to which he is justly entitled and the community achieves its richest flowering. For
everything that is really great and inspiring is created by the individual who can labor in freedom.
Restriction is justified only so far as it may be needed for the security of existence.”

Freedom! To Einstein, individual freedom was the ultimate morality and, in 1933, he
made his famous declaration, “As long as I have any choice, I will stay only in a country where
political liberty, toleration and equality of all citizens before the law are the rule.” He personally
asked nothing more from life than the freedom to pursue his research into the mechanism of the
universe. He felt the physical, social, political, intellectual and spiritual freedom of all individuals
was essential and wrote, “In order to be content, men must also have the possibility of developing
their intellectual and artistic powers to whatever extent, according to their personal characteristics
and abilities.” He said the most essential kind of “outward freedom” involved social conditions
“of such a kind that the expression of opinions and assertions about general and particular matters
of knowledge will not involve dangers or serious disadvantages for him who expresses them.” He
felt this freedom of communication is indispensable for the development and extension of
scientific knowledge. He defined “inward freedom” as the development of science and the
creative activities of the spirit, “an infrequent gift of nature and a worthy objective for the
individual.”
Einstein went on to say that schools and the community can and should do much to
further this achievement of inward freedom by encouraging independent thought or “at least not
interfering with it.” He said that all too often schools interfere with the development of inward
freedom through authoritarian influences and through imposing on young people “excessive
spiritual burdens”. He wrote, “The worst thing seems to be for a school principally to work with
methods of fear, force and artificial authority. Such treatment destroys the sound sentiments,
sincerity and self-confidence of the pupil, producing the submissive subject . . . The only rational
way of educating is to be an example - of what to avoid, if one can’t be the other sort.”
Einstein wrote in ON EDUCATION that schools should develop in youngsters “those
qualities and capabilities which are of value for the welfare of the commonwealth. But that does
not mean individuality should be destroyed and the individual become a mere tool of the
community, like a bee or an ant. A community of standardized individuals without personal
originality and personal aims would be a poor community without possibilities for development.
Instead, the aim must be the training of independently acting and thinking individuals who see in
the service of the community their highest life problem.” He also felt it important that people not
take themselves or others too seriously and valued humor “in its due place”.
He felt that a school’s main goal should always be to produce individuals who are
“harmonious personalities”, not specialists. “If a person masters the fundamentals of his subject
and has learned to think and work independently, he will surely find his way and will be better
able to adapt himself to progress and changes than the person whose training principally consists
in the acquiring of detailed knowledge.” At the 1990 OATAG Conference, Dr. Smutny stated that
she felt education has focused too much on technical brilliance and achievement and “separated
our heads from our hearts.”
Einstein wrote, “It is not the fruits of scientific research that elevate a man and enrich his
nature, but the urge to understand, the intellectual work, creative or receptive . . . I believe one
does people the best service by giving them some elevating work to do.”
Albert Einstein was not only an extraordinary scientist and mathematician and an
extraordinary philosopher, moralist, and teacher, he was an extraordinary human being! We can
learn from him not only quantum physics, but how to educate our children, especially our gifted
children. We need to change our school systems to help encourage the development of the
“inward freedom” of independent thought. We need to allow our children the freedom and
opportunity to develop “harmonious personalities” as well as “the gifts which may be latent” in
them. We need to teach our children to not only tolerate differences between individuals and
 between groups, but to welcome their enrichment of our existence. We need to teach them that
science, mathematics, technology, philosophy, ethics, spirituality, music and the arts are all
merely “different branches of the same tree”, all with the same purpose of ennobling the lives of
individuals and enabling society to achieve its “richest flowering.”
(References: Paul Arthur Schilpp, editor (1951), Albert Einstein: Philosopher-Scientist, Volume
II, New York: Harper and Brothers Publishers (Harper Torchbook edition), pp. 730–746His non-
scientific works include: About Zionism: Speeches and Lectures by Professor Albert Einstein
(1930), "Why War?" (1933, co-authored by Sigmund Freud), The World As I See It (1934), Out
of My Later Years (1950), and a book on science for the general reader, The Evolution of Physics
(1938, co-authored by Leopold Infeld).

C. GLOSSARY OF TERMS:
1. SOLIPSISM - is the position in Metaphysics and Epistemology that the mind is the only
thing that can be known to exist and that knowledge of anything outside the mind is
unjustified. It is a skeptical hypothesis, and leads to the belief that the whole of reality and the
external world and other people are merely representations of the individual self, having no
independent existence of their own, and might in fact not even exist. It is not, however, the
same as Skepticism (the epistemological position that one should refrain from even making
truth claims).
2. MONISM - is the metaphysical and theological view that all is one, that there are no
fundamental divisions, and that a unified set of laws underlie all of nature. The universe, at
the deepest level of analysis, is then one thing or composed of one fundamental kind of stuff.
It sets itself in contrast to Dualism, which holds that ultimately there are two kinds of
substance, and from Pluralism, which holds that ultimately there are many kinds of substance.
3. DUALISM – a set of beliefs which begins with the claim that the mental and the physical
have a fundamentally different nature. It is contrasted with varying kinds of monism,
including materialism and phenomenalism. Dualism is one answer to the mind-body problem.
Pluralism holds that there are even more kinds of events or things in the world.
 substance dualism – is a type of ontological dualism defended by Descartes in which it
is claimed that there are two fundamental kinds of substance: mental and material. The
mental does not extend in space, and material cannot think. It holds that immortal souls
occupy an independent realm of existence, while apparently bodies die. This view
contradicts physicalism.
4. MATERIALISM - holds that the only thing that can be truly proven to exist is matter. Thus,
according to Materialism, all things are composed of material and all phenomena are the
result of material interactions, with no accounting of spirit or consciousness. As well as a
general concept in Metaphysics, it is more specifically applied to the mind-body problem in
Philosophy of Mind.
5. REALISM - at its simplest and most general, is the view that entities of a certain type have
an objective reality, a reality that is completely ontologically independent of our conceptual
schemes, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc. Thus, entities (including abstract concepts and
universals as well as more concrete objects) have an existence independent of the act of
perception, and independent of their names.
6. PANTHEISM - is the view that God is equivalent to Nature or the physical universe - that
they are essentially the same thing - or that everything is of an all-encompassing immanent
abstract God. Thus, each individual human, being part of the universe or nature, is part of
God. The term "pantheism" was coined by the Irish writer John Toland in 1705.
7. POSITIVISM - is the view that the only authentic knowledge is scientific knowledge, and
that such knowledge can only come from positive affirmation of theories through strict
scientific method (techniques for investigating phenomena based on gathering observable,
empirical and measurable evidence, subject to specific principles of reasoning). The doctrine
 was developed in the mid-19th Century by the French sociologist and philosopher Auguste
Comte (1798 - 1857).
8. NIHILISM - is the philosophical position which argues that Being, especially past and
current human existence, is without objective meaning, purpose, comprehensible truth, or
essential value. It asserts that there is no reasonable proof of the existence of a higher ruler or
creator, that a "true morality" does not exist, and that objective secular ethics are impossible.
Therefore life has, in a sense, no truth and no action is objectively preferable to any other.
9. SKEPTICISM - (or Scepticism in the UK spelling), also known as Pyrrhonism or Pyrrhonic
Skepticism after the early proponent Pyrrho of Elis, is the philosophical position that one
should refrain from making truth claims, and avoid the postulation of final truths. This is not
necessarily quite the same as claiming that truth is impossible (which would itself be a truth
claim), but is often also used to cover the position that there is no such thing as certainty in
human knowledge (sometimes referred to as Academic Skepticism).
In philosophy, it can refer to:
an inquiry
the limitations of knowledge
a method of obtaining knowledge through systematic doubt and continual testing
the arbitrariness, relativity, or subjectivity of moral values
a method of intellectual caution and suspended judgment
10. AGNOSTICISM - the philosophical view that the truth values of certain claims —
particularly theological claims regarding the existence of God, gods, or deities — are
unknown, inherently unknowable, or incoherent, and therefore, (some agnostics may go as far
to say) irrelevant to life. Agnosticism, in both its strong (explicit) and weak (implicit) forms,
is necessarily a non-atheist and non-theist position, though an agnostic person may also be
either an atheist, a theist, or one who endorses neither position.
 agnostic atheism – the philosophical view that encompasses both atheism and
agnosticism. Due to definitional variance, an agnostic atheist does not believe in God or
gods and by extension holds true: 'the existence and nonexistence of deities is currently
unknown and may be absolutely unknowable', or 'knowledge of the existence and
nonexistence of deities is irrelevant or unimportant', or 'abstention from claims of
knowledge of the existence and nonexistence of deities is optimal'.
 agnostic theism – the philosophical view that encompasses both theism and agnosticism.
An agnostic theist is one who views that the truth value of claims regarding the existence
of god(s) is unknown or inherently unknowable but chooses to believe in god(s) in spite
of this.
 strong agnosticism – also referred to as explicit agnosticism and positive agnosticism, it
is the view that the evidence in the universe is such that it is impossible for humans to
know whether or not any deities exist.
 weak agnosticism – the position that the evidence is such that the existence or
nonexistence of deities is currently unknown, but is not necessarily unknowable. Also
called implicit agnosticism, empirical agnosticism, and negative agnosticism.
(http://www.philosophybasics.com/branch_agnosticism.html, The Basics of Philosophy)
11. ATHEISM – a condition of being without theistic beliefs; an absence of belief in the
existence of gods, thus contrasting with theism. This definition includes both those who assert
that there are no gods and those who have no beliefs at all regarding the existence of gods.
However, narrower definitions often only qualify the former as atheism, the latter falling
under the more general (but rarely used) term nontheism.
 agnostic atheism – the philosophy that encompasses both atheism and agnosticism. An
agnostic atheist thinks they do not know whether or not deities exist, but does not have a
belief in them. This can encompass a wide range of positions, including strong agnostic
positions that the existence or nonexistence of deities is unknowable, strong atheist
 positions that we can reject the proposition as unlikely without knowing for sure, and
weak agnostic, weak atheist positions of not accepting a belief since they don't know one
way or another.
 explicit atheism – a condition of having consciously rejected the idea that any deities
exist. Some explicit atheists take the position that belief in deities is unjustified without
extraordinarily compelling evidence, which they do not have.
 implicit atheism – a condition of being without theistic beliefs simply because one has
not considered the matter, not because one has rejected the proposition.
 agnostic atheism – the philosophy that encompasses both atheism and gnosticism. A
gnostic atheist not only believes that no deities exist, but thinks they know this is the
case. Some gnostic atheists claim that the existence of any and all gods is logically
impossible. Since gnostic atheism includes a knowledge claim, it is stronger than strong
atheism. All gnostic atheists are strong atheists.
 strong atheism – the philosophical position that deities do not exist. It is a form of
explicit atheism, meaning that it consciously rejects theism. Also called hard atheism,
positive atheism, or theoretical atheism. Some strong atheists argue that the consistency
of natural laws is reason to believe in the nonexistence of beings that can defy them.
 weak atheism – nonbelief in the existence of any deities, without a commitment to the
necessary non-existence of deities. Also referred to as soft atheism, negative atheism, or
pragmatic atheism. Some weak atheists argue that no argument is necessary for disbelief,
because disbelief should be a default position for claims that have not met their burden of
proof
12. PESSIMISM – a belief that the experienced world is the worst possible. It describes a
general belief that things are bad, and tend to become worse; or that looks to the eventual
triumph of evil over good; it contrasts with optimism, the contrary belief in the goodness and
betterment of things generally. A common conundrum illustrates optimism versus pessimism
with the question - does one regard a given glass of water as: "Is the glass half empty or half
full?" Conventional wisdom expects optimists to reply with half full and pessimists to
respond with half empty, but this is not always the case.
13. OPTIMISM – historically, the philosophical position that this is the best of all possible
worlds, usually associated with Gottfried Leibniz. More often used to describe a cheerful or
positive worldview.
14. ALTRUISM – the belief that people have a moral obligation to serve others or the "greater
good"; term coined by Auguste Comte. Generally opposed to self-interest or egoism.
15. HEDONISM –an ethical or aesthetic view which holds pleasure as the highest good or most
valuable thing. Hedonism is usually associated with a more physical, egoistic, unrefined, or
sexual definition of "pleasure" than than that found in the related utilitarianism.
16. STOICISM - A school of philosophy during the Roman Empire that emphasized reason as a
means of understanding the natural state of things, or logos, and as a means of freeing oneself
from emotional distress.
- A real or pretended indifference to pleasure or pain; insensibility; impassiveness.
17. NARCISSISM - is the pursuit of gratification from vanity, or egotistic admiration of one's
own physical or mental attributes, that derive from arrogant pride. The term originated with
Narcissus in Greek mythology who fell in love with his own image reflected in a pool of
water.
II. SUMMATIVE TEST
1. WRITE A POSITION PAPER ON WHY PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHIES
OF LIFE?

WHY DO PEOPLE HAVE DIFFERENT PHILOSOPHIES OF LIFE?

There are great many different philosophies, and indeed, anyone is free to invent a new one.
Philosophies are generally intended to identify the most important aspect of life. This could be to serve
God, to serve other people, to serve oneself, to have fun, to be important, to contribute to the evolution of
human society, to achieve immortality through your descendants, and so forth.
There are a lot of factors on why do people have different philosophies of life. Each factor has a
great influence on one’s own philosophy of life. Our philosophy comprises: How we think about
ourselves, how we think about others and how we think about the world and how we think about life. It is
formed and influenced by: childhood upbringing, perspectives, past experiences, culture, faith, values,
current circumstances and character traits, including genetic influences.
Individual philosophies of life depend on their childhood upbringing of their parents. Certainly,
many people will carry on the beliefs given to them by their parents and family. People have different
philosophies because they have different perspectives or viewpoints of life. The way we look at
something affects the way we feel and the way that we act. Perspective is something that we have control
over and does affect our daily lives. What we look for, we will find. For example, if I have a positive
perspective towards life – “Life is good” vs. “Life is full of troubles,” then I will be searching for
experiences that support my perspective that “Life is good.” I will notice when events happen that support
my perspective and reinforce my perspective (I enjoyed a good conversation with a friend; I shared a
huge laugh with my children.) So, if you want a more positive experience, then choose a more positive
perspective. Another example, when there's a traffic accident, police ask for witnesses to come forward
and describe what happened. They like to have as many witness statements as possible so that they can
build up enough evidence to give them a broader, more realistic version of events. In a traffic accident,
there will be many different perspectives on what happened. The driver of one car will have one view,
another driver or a passenger will have yet another view. Each onlooker who witnessed the accident will
have a slightly different perspective, depending on where they were, how far they were, how good a view
they had, what else was going on, how much danger they felt they were in, how the accident affected
them, what the accident means to them.
It's the same principle with everything - each situation, event, conversation, means something
different to all those involved, and also to those not involved. We give different meanings, according to
our belief systems, and how we are affected by the event.
We all have our own realities. Anais Nin said “We don’t see things as they are, we see things as
we are”. We look at situations, events, and interpret what other people say and do, according to our own
set of past experiences, culture, faith, values, all of which help us form our philosophies about
ourselves, about others, about life and about the world in general. The meaning we give events, the way
we make sense of our world, is based upon our set of philosophies.
People also take things in differently because no person has the exact same qualities; no person is
alike and that means no person thinks alike. Since we all think differently people have different
perspectives on life. Some may think it’s pointless because you just die in the end. Others think of it
irreplaceable because you only have one and you might as well live it with no regrets. Some think it is
tough others think of it as easy. It depends culturally too. Even though everyone is in the same world-
certain groups’ believe different things. Like in poor people will think life as tough and unfair, other
people take it for granted because it couldn't get much better.
In conclusion, people have different philosophies of life because people have different childhood
upbringing; they view life differently from each other, they have different beliefs, different values,
different personalities, personal experiences and genetic traits.
2. WHAT ARE THE GENERALLY ACCEPTED SCHOOL OF THOUGHT EXPLAINING HOW TRUTH IS ARRIVED AT? WHO
IS THE MAIN ADVOCATE OF EACH SCHOOL AND WHAT IS HIS MAIN IDEA?
Through history, various forms of philosophy have developed. Many have fallen by the wayside but a number have stuck. Here
are the following major philosophical schools of thoughts with their main advocate and each main idea.
 MANUEL LUIS QUEZON UNIVERSITY
School of Graduate Studies
Doctor of Philosophy in Psychology
Quiapo, Manila

COURSE OUTLINE REPORT

Submitted to:

DR. FELIPE I. ILLEDAN

Professor

In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for Course

CONTEMPORARY PHILOSOPHY (DCS CP)
Summer 2014

Submitted by:

ARVELLA M. ALBAY
PhD Psych Student

May 17, 2014