From Rationalism To Existentialism Pdf Files
Author by: Dr. Jack ReynoldsLanguage: enPublisher by: RoutledgeFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 59Total Download: 619File Size: 46,9 MbDescription: Understanding Existentialism provides an accessible introduction to existentialism by examining the major themes in the work of Heidegger, Sartre, Merleau-Ponty and de Beauvoir. Paying particular attention to the key texts, Being and Time, Being and Nothingness, Phenomenology of Perception, The Ethics of Ambiguity and The Second Sex, the book explores the shared concerns and the disagreements between these major thinkers. The fundamental existential themes examined include: freedom; death, finitude and mortality; phenomenological experiences and 'moods', such as anguish, angst, nausea, boredom, and fear; an emphasis upon authenticity and responsibility as well as the denigration of their opposites (inauthenticity and Bad Faith); a pessimism concerning the tendency of individuals to become lost in the crowd and even a pessimism about human relations more generally; and a rejection of any external determination of morality or value. Finally, the book assesses the influence of these philosophers on poststructuralism, arguing that existentialism remains an extraordinarily productive school of thought.
Author by: Jon StewartLanguage: enPublisher by: RoutledgeFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 47Total Download: 375File Size: 42,7 MbDescription: There can be no doubt that most of the thinkers who are usually associated with the existentialist tradition, whatever their actual doctrines, were in one way or another influenced by the writings of Kierkegaard. This influence is so great that it can be fairly stated that the existentialist movement was largely responsible for the major advance in Kierkegaard's international reception that took place in the twentieth century. In Kierkegaard's writings one can find a rich array of concepts such as anxiety, despair, freedom, sin, the crowd, and sickness that all came to be standard motifs in existentialist literature. Sartre played an important role in canonizing Kierkegaard as one of the forerunners of existentialism. However, recent scholarship has been attentive to his ideological use of Kierkegaard. Indeed, Sartre seemed to be exploiting Kierkegaard for his own purposes and suspicions of misrepresentation and distortions have led recent commentators to go back and reexamine the complex relation between Kierkegaard and the existentialist thinkers. The articles in the present volume feature figures from the French, German, Spanish and Russian traditions of existentialism.
Empiricism Versus Rationalism Pdf
They examine the rich and varied use of Kierkegaard by these later thinkers, and, most importantly, they critically analyze his purported role in this famous intellectual movement. Author by: Stephen MichelmanLanguage: enPublisher by: Rowman & LittlefieldFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 27Total Download: 677File Size: 47,9 MbDescription: The A to Z of Existentialism explains the central claims of existentialist philosophy and the contexts in which it developed into one of the most influential intellectual trends of the 20th century. This is done through a chronology, an introductory essay, a bibliography, and more than 300 cross-referenced dictionary entries offering clear, accessible accounts of the life and thought of major existentialists like Jean-Paul Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Martin Buber, Karl Jaspers, Gabriel Marcel, Simone de Beauvoir, Albert Camus, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, as well as thinkers influential to its development such as Wilhelm Dilthey, Henri Bergson, Edmund Husserl, and Max Scheler. Author by: Wendy O'BrienLanguage: enPublisher by: Springer Science & Business MediaFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 20Total Download: 470File Size: 44,9 MbDescription: While earlier research considered Simone de Beauvoir in the perspectives of Existentialism or Feminism, this work is the first to emphasize her reflective and descriptive approach and the full range of issues she addresses.
There are valuable chapters and sections that are historical and/or comparative, but most of the contents of this work critically examine Beauvoir's views on old age (whereon she is the first phenomenologist to work), biology, gender, ethics, ethnicity (where she is among the first), and politics (again among the first). Besides their systematic as well as historical significance, these chapters show her philosophy as on a par with those of Merleau-Ponty and Jean-Paul Sartre in quality, richness and distinctiveness of problematics, and the penetration of her insight into collective as well as individual human life within the socio-historical world. Author by: Martin HeideggerLanguage: enPublisher by: Philosophical LibraryFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 94Total Download: 784File Size: 49,5 MbDescription: 'On the day of German Labor, on the day of the Community of the People, the Rector of Freiburg University, Dr. Marin Heidegger, made his official entry into the National Socialist Party.' And so begins one of the most controversial philosophical texts available today.
Heidegger, a German Nationalist and proud Nazi, thoroughly examines the history, the philosophy, and the rise to power of the Nazi movement in Germany. Martin Heidegger's distinguished Italian colleague, Professor Benedetto Croce, said of his German contemporary, 'This man dishonors philosophy and that is an evil for politics too.' Croce's severe rebuke was not singular at the time when Hitlerism was rampant over Europe. It is true that among the almost one thousand professional philosophers of Germany and Austria only very few actively opposed National Socialism. On the other hand, no one degraded his historic profession in the manner Heidegger did, by becoming a spokesman for National Socialism and attempting to mold his theories into one pattern with Hitlerism. Heidegger's contribution to the growth and development of National Socialism was immense. In this small anthology Dr.
Existentialism Is Humanism Pdf
Runes endeavors to point to the utter confusion Heidegger created by drawing, for political and social application of his own existentialism metaphysics, upon the decadent and repulsive brutalization of Hitlerism.Martin Heidegger was a philosopher most known for his contributions to German phenomenological and existential thought. Heidegger was born in rural Messkirch in 1889 to Catholic parents. While studying philosophy and mathematics at Albert-Ludwig University in Freiburg, Heidegger became the assistant for philosopher Edmund Husserl. Influenced by Husserl, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche, Heidegger wrote extensively on the quality of Being, including his opus Being and Time. He served as professor of philosophy at Albert-Ludwig University and taught there during the war. In 1933, Heidegger joined the National Socialist German Worker's (or Nazi) Party and expressed his support for Hitler in several articles and speeches. After the war, his support for the Nazi party came under attack, and he was tried as a sympathizer.
Introduction To Existentialism Pdf
He was able to return to Albert-Ludwig University, however, and taught there until he retired. Heidegger continued to lecture and write until his death 1973.
Author by: Robert C. SolomonLanguage: enPublisher by: Rowman & LittlefieldFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 27Total Download: 641File Size: 40,6 MbDescription: In this text, philosopher Robert Solomon provides students with an introduction to modern existentialism. He shows how this philosophy not only connects with, but derives from the thought of traditional philosophers such as Kant and Hegel. From there, Solomon traces its development through the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre and Merleau-Ponty. Thus, existentialism emerges from the school of rational thought as a logical evolution of respected philosophy.
Author by: Haim GordonLanguage: enPublisher by: RoutledgeFormat Available: PDF, ePub, MobiTotal Read: 14Total Download: 539File Size: 42,8 MbDescription: Existentialism, as a philosophy, gained prominence after World War II. Instead of focusing upon a particular aspect of human existence, existentialists argued that our focus must be upon the whole being as he/she exists in the world. Rebelling against the rationalism of such philosophers as Descartes and Hegel, existentialists reject the emphasis placed on man as primarily a thinking being. Freedom is central to human existence, and human relations and encounters cannot be reduced simply to 'thinking.' This Dictionary provides-through alphabetically arranged entries-overviews of the various tenets, philosophers, and writers of existentialism, and of those writers/philosophers who, in retrospect, seem to existentialists to espouse their philosophy: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, et al.
Challenges to epistemological rationalismAt first glance the claim of that knowledge must come from sense experience seems obvious: How else could one hope to make contact with the world around one? Consequently, rationalism has been sharply challenged—in the 19th century by the empiricism of (1806–73) and in the 20th by that of the, among other movements. Mill argued that all a priori certainties are illusory: Why do people believe, for example, that two straight lines cannot enclose a space? Is it because they see it as logically necessary? No, it is because they have experienced so long and so unbroken a row of instances of it—a new one whenever they see the corner of a table or the bordering rays of a light beam—that they have formed the habit of thinking in this way and are now unable to break it.
A priori propositions, Mill claimed, are merely statements of very high generality.This theory has now been abandoned by most empiricists themselves. Its that such statements as “2 + 2 = 4” are only probably true and may have exceptions has proved quite unconvincing. The rationalist’s rejoinder is that one cannot, no matter how hard one tries, conceive 2 + 2 as making 5, for its equaling 4 is necessary. But is also universal. Neither of these two characteristics can be accounted for by sense experience.
That a crow is black can be perceived, but not that it must be black or that crows will always be black; no run of perceptions, however long, could assure us of such truths. On the other hand, a priori truths can be seen with certainty—that if a figure, for instance, is a plane triangle within a, its angles must and always will equal two right angles.One of the most challenges to rationalism came in the 20th century from such logical positivists as the Oxford empiricist (1910–89) and (1891–1970), who had been a central figure in the, where this movement first arose. Unlike Mill, they accepted a priori knowledge as certain; but they laid down a new challenge—the denial of its philosophical importance. A priori propositions, they said, are (1) linguistic, (2) conventional, and (3): (1) They are statements primarily of how one proposes to use words; if one says that “a straight line is the shortest line between two points,” this merely reports one’s definition of “straight” and declares one’s purpose to use it only of the shortest.
(2) Being a definition, such a statement expresses a convention to which there are alternatives; it may be defined in terms of the paths of light rays if one chooses. (3) The statement is in that it merely repeats in its a part or the whole of the subject term and hence tells nothing new; it is not a statement about nature but about meanings only. And since rationalistic systems depend throughout upon statements of this kind, their importance is illusory. To this clear challenge some leading rationalists have replied as follows: (1) positivists have confused with verbal definition. A verbal definition does indeed state what a word means; but a real definition states what an object is, and the thought of a straight line is the thought of an object, not of words. (2) The positivists have confused conventions in thought with conventions in language.
One is free to vary the language in which a proposition is expressed but not the proposition itself. Start with the concept of a straight line, and there is no to accepting it as the shortest. (3) Some a priori statements are admittedly analytic, but many are not. In “whatever is coloured is extended,” colour and extension are two different concepts of which the first entails the second but is not identical with it in whole or part. Contemporary rationalists therefore hold that the a priori has emerged victorious from the empiricists’ efforts to discredit such knowledge and the positivists’ attempts to trivialize it.