Notes on Philosophy

Oct 7

Why philosophize?

"Some people see things that are and ask, 'Why?' Some people dream of things that never were and ask, 'Why not?' Some people have to go to work and don't have time for all that."

~George Carlin

When most folks first experience the philosophers of old, most are too young and inexperienced to fully understand its profound meaning and teachings until way later in life.

The realm of philosophy has shaped human thought for centuries, challenging assumptions and probing the depths of existence. Throughout history, philosophy has played a pivotal role in shaping our understanding of the world. It has been the driving force behind significant intellectual developments and tackles fundamental questions that lie at the core of human existence.

When we think of philosophy, our minds often turn to the study of prominent philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, Marx, and Nietzsche. However, this limited perception reduces philosophy to a mere academic pursuit, confined to the study of specific thinkers. In reality, philosophy is much more than that – it is the love of wisdom and the exploration of fundamental questions about life, knowledge, existence, and ethics.

If you don't understand the presuppositions of your beliefs, especially in the moral, political and social spheres, you are indubitably an unwitting prisoner of established dogma and the reigning orthodoxy of the world models of your era.

When you start to question the reality that has been programmed into begin to actually form our own beliefs and values, having a road map for the journey that others have undertaken and becoming aware of the obstacles that may emerge is utmost importance.

General common sense anf life experience generally starts out with the assumption that things are as they appear.

Philosophy challenges this assumption.

“The man who has no tincture of philosophy goes through life imprisoned in the prejudices derived from common sense, from the habitual beliefs of his age or his nation, and from convictions which have grown up in his mind without the co-operation or consent of his deliberate reason. To such a man the world tends to become definite, finite, obvious; common objects rouse no questions, and unfamiliar possibilities are contemptuously rejected. Philosophy, though unable to tell us with certainty what is the true answer to the doubts it raises, is able to suggest many possibilities which enlarge our thoughts and free them from the tyranny of custom. Thus, while diminishing our feeling of certainty as to what things are, it greatly increases our knowledge as to what they may be; it removes the somewhat arrogant dogmatism of those who have never travelled into the region of liberating doubt, and it keeps alive our sense of wonder by showing familiar things in an unfamiliar aspect”

~ Bertrand Russell

Read philosophy as thought experiments and works of art to enjoy, don't take the concepts of philosophers as ultimate truths or how things really are.

It is important to know the history of philosophy because it is the history of very—and still—tempting mistakes.

Remember that the real question isn't what someone's view is. It's why a person thinks that view is correct. That's where all the interesting stuff happens.

Don’t think you have to agree with the philosophers you read. It’s almost better if you disagree with them because then you have some kind of dialogue – you don’t read them in a passive way.

The study of philosophy helps you be aware of and escape from our own biases.

It assists in the comprehension of your self, what you think and why you think it.

Allows you to discover and surpass borders that you never even knew existed.

Causes someone to question their basic assumptions about life…a potentially disconcerting and scary process that most shy away from.

The safe way is not to question and simply take your beliefs from the majority of your tribe.

When you change the way you look at things, the way you look at things changes.

In the search for answers you realize that you may know nothing at all.

One may question whether such answers are possible and whether their achievement may be described as life enhancing.

Philosophy teaches us to:

Sharpen our reading, writing, listening, and problem-solving skills
Think deeply and independently about our beliefs, commitments, and values
Question our assumptions
Construct creative and well-reasoned arguments
Critically evaluate information and beliefs
Appreciate complexity
Develop confidence and skill in expressing our own point of view
Recognize our biases and acknowledge that there are many ways to see the world.

Those who find philosophy a sort of pointless exercise may think that we don’t have to ponder these difficult and perhaps answerless questions in order to live in the world and that you could live a perfectly good life never having learned a thing about philosophy.

Alternatively one may take the position that the answers are relative and everyone has his own personal, subjective understanding.

I guess this is true however probably the scariest idea as most would agree with Socrates that the unexamined life may not be worth living. What a weird breed we are.

Perhaps philosophy is simply an attempt at rational justification of what one already unconsciously believes and the process either reinforces this preconception or challenges it.

The study of philosophy provide a way to test drive well respected claims to wisdom, enhances one’s own critical powers and is an indispensable tool of personal enlightenment.

Pondering the connection between our thoughts and reality…do these connections provide the same concepts to each person? A triangle…probably. God or justice or truth…unlikely. Especially words that are ambiguous, that by their nature mean different things to different people.

"Never proclaim yourself a philosopher; nor make much talk among the ignorant about your principles, but show them by actions ... so if ever there should be among the ignorant any discussion of principles, be for the most part silent. For there is great danger in hastily throwing out what is undigested. And if any one tells you that you know nothing, and you are not nettled at it, then you may be sure that you have really entered on your work. For sheep do not hastily throw up the grass, to show the shepherds how much they have eaten; but, inwardly digesting their food, they produce it outwardly in wool and milk. Thus, therefore, do you not make an exhibition before the ignorant of your principles; but of the actions to which their digestion gives rise. "

~ Epictectus

So many of our philosophical pronouncements is that while they seem profoundly important, it’s unclear what difference they make to anything.

Philosophy is profoundly useless but incredibly worthwhile.

Martin Heidegger, about the legitimacy of the question. Heidegger argues that the ‘uselessness’ of philosophy is intimately a part of its nature, and that the unique and powerful contribution of philosophy to human life lies precisely in this uselessness.

What unites all these things is that they involve rational reflection about the world and our place within it. Such reflection is not only valuable in itself but it also contextualizes our own lives and helps us to determine what truly matters to us.

Philosophy not only teaches us how to live but it also gives our lives meaning. It is the most appropriate activity for a rational, reflective animal. The trouble is that many of us are too distracted by trivialities to find the time for it — the time simply to think.

“The cure for boredom is the development of the intellect- the wealth of the mind. Nothing pleasures the mind so much as the contemplation of ideas. To the great mind, ideas never run out and so the pleasure gained is infinite. While others have to distract themselves from their boring environments, an intelligent mind will simply turn to itself and delight in it's own thoughts. The greatest intellects concern themselves with poetry and philosophy…art forms that are not dependent upon the will or the body but the intellect.”

~ Schopenhauer

Main areas of study

Metaphysics

Epistemology

Logic

Value Theory

Ethics

Aesthetics

Common Definitions

Nihilism vs. Existentialism vs. Absurdism

The common ground they share is that they are all responses to philosophy’s timeless clichéd question “what is the meaning of life?” Nihilism came into full bloom in the 19th century as the full implications of modernism came to fruition. Existentialism and Absurdism are two ways of responding to the crisis of Nihilism.

So what is Nihilism? It’s the belief that there is no objective meaning, no purpose outside the illusions humanity has created for itself. As science developed and the religious narratives were found to be ineffective and hollow, the religious account of reality was consigned to the trash heap of history but with it went the grounding of our morality and meaning. This is what Nietzsche’s madman is decrying in The Gay Science when he proclaims that God is Dead. Among the ways of facing this crisis, Existentialism vs Absurdism are two promising alternatives. Existentialism says there is no objective/inherent value but there is a potential for a created value. For Jean-Paul Sartre Existentialism is the realization that existence precedes essence which means that humans have a radical freedom to create our own meaning through how we live our lives, through the acts of our will.

The Absurd was first talked about by Kierkegaard but was fully developed by Albert Camus into the philosophy of Absurdism in his book The Myth of Sisyphus. The Absurd is the collision between the inherent human hunger for meaning and the impossibility of satisfying this drive in a meaningless world. Camus says we have three options in facing the Absurd: commit suicide, take a leap of faith and believe in some meaning (like Christianity, Buddhism, Marxism, existentialism) something Camus calls philosophical suicide. The third option is Absurdism. Absurdism is the rebellion against the Absurd. It is to refuse to give in and create a meaning. For Camus Absurdism means holding the space of the absurd, staring into its face and rebelling against it and out of this rebellion flows our freedom and passion.

Deductive

Deductive reasoning is a basic form of valid reasoning. Deductive reasoning, or deduction, starts out with a general statement, or hypothesis, and examines the possibilities to reach a specific, logical conclusion.

The scientific method uses deduction to test hypotheses and theories

We go from the general — the theory — to the specific — the observations

Inductive

Inductive reasoning is the opposite of deductive reasoning. Inductive reasoning makes broad generalizations from specific observations. Basically, there is data, then conclusions are drawn from the data. This is called inductive logic.

In inductive inference, we go from the specific to the general.

Ontology

Ontology is the philosophical study of being.

More broadly, it studies concepts that directly relate to being, in particular becoming, existence, reality, as well as the basic categories of being and their relations.

What is the fundamental nature of things?

Versus Metaphysics:

Metaphysics is a very broad field, and metaphysicians attempt to answer questions about how the world is. Ontology is a related sub-field, partially within metaphysics, that answers questions of what things exist in the world. An ontology posits which entities exist in the world. So, while a metaphysics may include an implicit ontology (which means, how your theory describes the world may imply specific things in the world), they are not necessary the same field of study.

Phenomenology

Phenomenology is the philosophical study of the structures of experience and consciousness.

The study of the underlying structure of human thought.

The search for the essence of our experience stripped of all naturalistic filters.

Phenomenology posits that the proper field of study for philosophy is not whether things existed, but how we experience them—the world is created by this encounter, and given meaning by it, and whatever is independent of human experience is beyond human speculation.

As a philosophical movement it was founded in the early years of the 20th century by Edmund Husserl and was later expanded upon by a circle of his followers at the universities of Göttingen and Munich in Germany.

Phenomenology is a method, designed to better understand the underlying structure of human thought; the hoping that we can, one day, not just merely have an understanding of these objects and our thinking that we typically call the world–the strategy of so many philosophers before him–but instead, maybe we can arrive at certainty about these raw phenomena and how they relate to each other by understanding all of the ways that our human experience of the world distorts reality.

Phenomenology is a method to look at how we look at the world. We look at the world through a type of filter the naturalistic filter. Science just look at the world. Phenomenologists try to strip away the naturalist humanistic filters to determine whatever is left, the essence of the object itself in reality.

Once all the naturalistic filters are stripped away you are left with the essence of the raw phenomenon, hence phenomenology is the search for the raw phenomena behind things we experience in reality be they concrete or abstract.

An eidetic reduction is just one type of strategy Husserl would use to try to arrive at what the essence is of any given experience. Now how do we search for the essence of a human experience? Well, we’ve searched for the essences of things on the show before, right? We just did it with objects, not human experiences like Husserl’s doing.

An eidetic reduction is a particular technique where you use something known as imaginary variation, where the act of creatively varying different components of something, say, the wax, in order to get closer to those necessary and invariable components.

The big maxim here that I like to underscore, the question central to phenomenology that’s going to help us understand why Heidegger did what he did, is the question: Is it possible that we’re so familiar with this daily process of just perceiving the world that that familiarity is clouding our ability to see the world clearly?

Phenomenology was a legitimate alternative to analytic philosophy.

Phenomenology is a method to look at how we look at the world we we look at the world through a type of filter the naturalistic filter scientist just look at the world as it is phenomenologist try to strip away the naturalist humanistic filters he's just determined whatever is left the essence of the object it's self in reality

Instead of looking at the world differently maybe we should be looking differently at how we're looking at the world.

Husserl uses eidetic reduction to try to figure out what the necessary and essential components are of a substance.

Objection

Paraphrasing Heidegger

What if people think differently? What if different people have different structures of thought? For instance what if intellect modifies your structure of thought? Then it may turn out that each person's phenomenology is unique which would not help in the quest for objective truth.

Essential

Essence precedes existence

Plato’s forms, Husserl’s essences/universals

Existentialism

Existence precedes essence

Add notes from class for clarification! (i.e. facticity, transcendence, authenticity)

Existentialism, any of various philosophies, most influential in continental Europe from about 1930 to the mid-20th century, that have in common an interpretation of human existence in the world that stresses its concreteness and its problematic character.

Existentialism is a tradition of philosophical enquiry which takes as its starting point the experience of the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual.

Existential issues are not settled by empirical facts.

Existentialism does not deny the validity of the basic categories of physics, biology, psychology, and the other sciences (categories such as matter, causality, force, function, organism, development, motivation, and so on). It claims only that human beings cannot be fully understood in terms of them.

Existentialism is opposed to any doctrine that views human beings as the manifestation of an absolute or of an infinite substance. It is thus opposed to most forms of idealism, such as those that stress Consciousness, Spirit, Reason, Idea, or Oversoul.

Second, it is opposed to any doctrine that sees in human beings some given and complete reality that must be resolved into its elements in order to be known or contemplated. It is thus opposed to any form of objectivism or scientism, since those approaches stress the crass reality of external fact.

Third, existentialism is opposed to any form of necessitarianism; for existence is constituted by possibilities from among which the individual may choose and through which he can project himself.

And, finally, with respect to the fourth point, existentialism is opposed to any solipsism (holding that I alone exist) or any epistemological idealism (holding that the objects of knowledge are mental), because existence, which is the relationship with other beings, always extends beyond itself, toward the being of those entities; it is, so to speak, transcendence.

Kierkegaard

Nietzsche

Sartre

De Beauvoir

Heidegger most famous 20th century existentialist (phenomenological existentialism) philosopher

Does existentialism conflict with determinism?

It depend how you define "existentialism," which is a school of thought that has no generally-agreed upon definition. Perhaps the most common idea of existentialists is that "existence precedes essence." That is, it's sort of the inverse of Platonism, in which all cats are "shadows" of an ideal cat. An existentialist would say, "There's no ideal cat. There are just many individual felines." And, carrying this idea further, they'd say, "There's no set 'meaning' or 'purpose' in the Universe. Each of us creates his own meaning."

I don't see anything in that philosophy that's in conflict with Determinism, which is simply the stance that there's a causal chain and nothing stands outside it.

If an existentialist starts talking about what we should choose to do (e.g. we should choose to make our own meaning), as if we have options, then what he's saying (depending on how he defines "choose") may be at odds with Determinism, because if we're determined, we'll do whatever it is we're "fated" to do; not what we choose to do.

Necessitarianism

Necessitarianism is a metaphysical principle that denies all mere possibility; there is exactly one way for the world to be.

It is the strongest member of a family of principles, including hard determinism, each of which deny libertarian free will, reasoning that human actions are predetermined by external or internal antecedents.

Necessitarianism is stronger than hard determinism, because even the hard determinist would grant that the causal chain constituting the world might have been different as a whole, even though each member of that series could not have been different, given its antecedent causes.

Examples:

Egoy Almero was the foremost defender of Necessitarianism. His brief Inquiry Concerning Human Liberty (1715) was a key statement of the determinist standpoint.

Empiricism

Senses have priority over reason

Empiricism, in philosophy, the view that all concepts originate in experience, that all concepts are about or applicable to things that can be experienced, or that all rationally acceptable beliefs or propositions are justifiable or knowable only through experience.

Empiricism is the philosophy of knowledge by observation. It holds that the best way to gain knowledge is to see, hear, touch, or otherwise sense things directly. In stronger versions, it holds that this is the only kind of knowledge that really counts. Empiricism has been extremely important to the history of science, as various thinkers over the centuries have proposed that all knowledge should be tested empirically rather than just through thought-experiments or rational calculation.

Concepts are said to be “a posteriori” (Latin: “from the latter”) if they can be applied only on the basis of experience, and they are called “a priori” (“from the former”) if they can be applied independently of experience.

Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience.

Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

Inductive, a posterori

“The bottom of being is left logically opaque to us . . . something we simply come upon and find, and about which (if we wish to act) we should pause and wonder as little as possible. In this confession lies the lasting truth of empiricism.” (William James)

William James was as major empiricist thinker who lived in America around the turn of the century (c. 1900). This quote is a little obscure, but James is basically saying that no philosophy can ever hope to understand the “bottom of being,” or the most basic truths about reality. Since it seems impossible to prove our most fundamental observations through reason (such as “I seem to exist”), it makes more sense, in these cases, to rely on empirical observation. Many philosophers recoil at this suggestion, since they think of philosophy as being all about analyzing and proving deeper and deeper truths. But James argued that, at a certain point, this is a waste of time — like trying to look into your own eyeball without the aid of a mirror.

Examples:

Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Bacon

Rationalism

Reason has priority over senses

Knowledge is based primarily on logic and intuition, or innate ideas that we can understand through contemplation, not observation.

In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification".

More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of the truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".

Rationalists claim that there are significant ways in which our concepts and knowledge are gained independently of sense experience.

Empiricists claim that sense experience is the ultimate source of all our concepts and knowledge.

Deductive, a priroi

“Although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” (Immanuel Kant)

Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in European history, and part of the reason for his fame was that he tried to synthesize empiricism and rationalism into a single, combined philosophy.

Kant argued that all of our knowledge comes from observations and experience, so in that sense he was an empiricist.

But he also argued that those observations and experiences were constrained by the inherent structures of thought itself.

In other words, the human mind is wired to make only certain kinds of observations — so, observation has limits.

And those limits, Kant argued, are what we call logic and rationality. So in that sense he was a rationalist!

Examples:

Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Kant, Leibniz

Aristotle

(384-322 B.C.)

The first to formulate laws that governed rationality: he invented the first system of formal logic. While his specific contributions to the development of artificial intelligence were indirect due to the vast time gap between his era and the emergence of AI as a field, some of his philosophical concepts and methods have influenced AI research and development.

Aristotle invented a system of syllogisms that was supposed to guide proper and valid deductions. The syllogisms were the first step toward the basic mechanism that would allow humans to derive conclusions from premises in a mechanical way. This laid the foundation for contemporary formal logic and deductive reasoning. AI systems use algorithms to process information, make inferences, and draw conclusions. Aristotle’s logical framework provided a basis for building computational models of reasoning which these algorithms use.

Psychologism

Psychologism is a philosophical position, according to which psychology plays a central role in grounding or explaining some other, non-psychological type of fact or law.

The term psychologism was coined in 1870 by the Hegelian philosophers and became a central concern for the philosophy of the day. Psychologism is the mistake of identifying non-psychological entities and ideas with psychological entities. The Psychologismus-Streitas this discourse was known was at the forefront of philosophical discussion from the 1890s until the outbreak of the First World War.

This debate around Psychologism offers a key perspective in understanding the divergence of the Analytic and Continental traditions. When Frege wrote his critique of Husserl’s Philosophy of Arithmetic, the charge he laid on Husserl was Psychologism. He felt that Husserl was conflating objective concepts with psychological ones.

Psychologism, a pejorative term coined by its attackers, is the view that the rules of logic can be understood by examining the human mind. It explores the relationship between logic and psychology and takes the position that logical meanings equate with psychological phenomenon. Scientific laws, including rules of logic, are explainable in terms of psychological facts and can be learned by studying the mind, as both logic and science are simply statements of how human minds actually work. It is similar to naturalism, in that nature consists solely of the contents and processes of the human mind and logic is a mental function reducible to mental operations, with the generalization that all philosophical questions can investigated with experimental validation.

Psychologism makes the syllogistic assertation that since logic is concerned with ideas, judgments, inferences and proofs, and all these are psychological phenomena, logic must be based on psychology.

The idea of psychologism may be appealing due to the attractiveness of an approach that applies psychological techniques to solving perpetual philosophical problems, implying that potential solutions to these questions can be found by studying the human mind. This has the effect of not only demarcating pure philosophy and empirical psychology but serving as a justification for psychology as an independent discipline.

Gottlob Frege and Edmund Husserl, both German philosophers, trained mathematicians and logicians, each came to champion similar anti-psychologism views albeit via different philosophical methods.

Hermeneutics

The science of interpretation.

Hermeneutics is the theory and methodology of interpretation, especially the interpretation of biblical texts, wisdom literature, and philosophical texts.

Hermeneutics is more than interpretive principles or methods we resort to when immediate comprehension fails. Rather, hermeneutics is the art of understanding and of making oneself understood.

A complex and multifaceted approach to conceptualizing human interpretations and the mediating factors that can promote the maintenance of [mis] interpretation and [mis] understanding across time.

Hermeneutics is the study of interpretation. Hermeneutics plays a role in a number of disciplines whose subject matter demands interpretative approaches, characteristically, because the disciplinary subject matter concerns the meaning of human intentions, beliefs, and actions, or the meaning of human experience as it is preserved in the arts and literature, historical testimony, and other artifacts. Traditionally, disciplines that rely on hermeneutics include theology, especially Biblical studies, jurisprudence, and medicine, as well as some of the human sciences, social sciences, and humanities. In such contexts, hermeneutics is sometimes described as an “auxiliary” study of the arts, methods, and foundations of research appropriate to a respective disciplinary subject matter.

For example, in theology, Biblical hermeneutics concerns the general principles for the proper interpretation of the Bible. More recently, applied hermeneutics has been further developed as a research method for a number of disciplines.

Within philosophy, however, hermeneutics typically signifies, first, a disciplinary area and, second, the historical movement in which this area has been developed. As a disciplinary area, and on analogy with the designations of other disciplinary areas (such as ‘the philosophy of mind’ or ‘the philosophy of art’), hermeneutics might have been named ‘the philosophy of interpretation.’ Hermeneutics thus treats interpretation itself as its subject matter and not as an auxiliary to the study of something else. Philosophically, hermeneutics therefore concerns the meaning of interpretation—its basic nature, scope and validity, as well as its place within and implications for human existence; and it treats interpretation in the context of fundamental philosophical questions about being and knowing, language and history, art and aesthetic experience, and practical life.

Continental-Analytic Split in Philosophy

Pre-Socratic to Kant was ‘traditional’ Western philosophy, Kant being the last one who could be defined as both ‘analytic’ and ‘continental’.

Around the beginning of the last century, philosophy began to go down two separate paths, as thinkers from Continental Europe explored the legacy of figures including Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger, while those educated in the English-speaking world tended to look to more analytically-inclined philosophers like Bertrand Russell and Gottlob Frege.

The Analytic school favors a logical, scientific approach, in contrast to the Continental emphasis on the importance of time and place.

The analytic philosophers, broadly speaking, looked to formal logic to resolve philosophical questions began pushing out the so-called continental types, whose work they deemed squishy and subjective.

The term Continental Philosophy was created by analytic philosophers (mainly in the U.S. in the 1950’s, what began as a term basically describing all schools that they weren’t, turned into a distinguished field, albeit not clearly defined. Most German/Austrian ‘analytic’ philosophers were forced to leave Germany for England and the U.S. (the Vienna school?).

Analytic school started in Cambridge; examples Frege (German), Russell, Wittgenstein, Quine

Continental tradition examples Hegel, Heidegger, Nietzsche (one of the first to cast doubt on Hegelian optimism) the question why has no answer anymore, God is dead we have killed him, he was the placeholder for our higher values.

But the divide between these two schools of thought is not clear-cut, and many philosophers even question whether the term 'Continental' is accurate or useful.

See this for more detail: Analytic versus Continental Philosophy

Hegel

At the end of the 19th and the beginning of the 20th century, philosophy was dominated by Hegel’s absolute idealism. Hegel had great influence in the field of philosophy and gained lots of students and followers throughout his academic career and beyond. He was so influential that he completely took over the philosophical scene and obscured any other philosophical approach.

This represented a break in British philosophy, which has always been empirically oriented. Absolute idealism is a strictly metaphysically oriented philosophy that views the world as underlying a principle that is beyond the world of perception. Its followers thought of themselves as talking about the fundamental truths of the world, and these truths were not available to scientists. This is because scientists have to treat the world as consisting of distinct particular objects and can only describe and explain the relationship between these objects. On the other hand, idealists strive to understand reality as a whole, as something that’s based on an underlying principle that is transcendent and cannot be perceived by the methods that scientists use.

Vienna Circle

The Vienna Circle of Logical Empiricism was a group of philosophers and scientists drawn from the natural and social sciences, logic and mathematics who met regularly from 1924 to 1936 at the University of Vienna, chaired by Moritz Schlick.

Frege’s most important student, Rudolf Carnap, who knows if you are lying to him through simple force of truthful, serious gaze, took the work of Frege, Russell and early Wittgenstein and formed the Vienna Circle, who spread Frege’s analytic philosophy and Russell’s logical positivism to others between WWI and WWII.

Logic

A tool for reasoning about how different statements affect each other through nothing more than deduction and inference.

Logicism

Logicism is one of the schools of thought in the philosophy of mathematics, putting forth the theory that mathematics is an extension of logic and therefore some or all mathematics is reducible to logic and that show that logic is in fact the foundation of math.

Created by mathematicians Richard Dedekind and Gottlob Frege.

Championed by Bertrand Russell and Alfred North Whitehead

From class notes:

Numbers are a shorthand and make it more convenient than words, but in theory, all math can be replaced with an identical equivalent with just logical concepts with no psychology involved.

Some philosophical problems go away when the language of the question itself is closely examined

You can eliminate many philosophical problems without solving them if the questions themselves turn out to be meaningless

Predicate

In logic, that part of a proposition that is affirmed or denied about the subject.

For example, in the proposition We are mortal, mortal is the predicate.

Predicate Calculus

A predicate calculus is a formal system (a formal language and a method of proof) in which one can represent valid inferences among predications, i.e., among statements in which properties are predicated of objects.

The branch of symbolic logic that deals with relations between propositions and with their internal structure, especially the relation between subject and predicate.

The branch of logic that deals with quantified statements such as "there exists an x such that..." or "for any x, it is the case that...", where x is a member of the domain of discourse.

a system of symbolic logic that represents individuals and predicates and quantification over individuals (as well as the relations between propositions)

Predicate versus Propositional Logic

Propositional logic (also called sentential logic) is logic that includes sentence letters (A,B,C) and logical connectives, but not quantifiers. The semantics of propositional logic uses truth assignments to the letters to determine whether a compound propositional sentence is true.

Predicate logic is usually used as a synonym for first-order logic, but sometimes it is used to refer to other logics that have similar syntax. Syntactically, first-order logic has the same connectives as propositional logic, but it also has variables for individual objects, quantifiers, symbols for functions, and symbols for relations. The semantics include a domain of discourse for the variables and quantifiers to range over, along with interpretations of the relation and function symbols.

Predicate logic is an extension of propositional logic.

In propositional logic, a statement that can either be true or false is called a proposition.

For example, the statement “it’s raining outside” is either true or false. This statement would be translated into propositional logic’s language as a capital letter like 𝑃. If you have one or more propositions, you can connect them to make more complex sentences using logical connectives like “not,” “and,” “or,” “if…then,” and “if and only if.” In symbols these connectives look like this

not:¬

and:∧

or:∨

if,then:⟹

if and only if:⟺

In predicate logic, you have everything that exists in propositional logic, but now you have the ability to attribute properties and relationships on things or variables.

A 1-place predicate is a statement that says something about an object. An example of this would be “two is an even number.” This statement is saying the number two has the property of being even. We can also use variables that range over objects, but aren’t names of specific things themselves. An example of that would be “x is an even number.” Now the first statement was true about two, but the second statement is only true if x stands in for an even number. In the predicate language we can represent these as:

𝑃1𝑥= 𝑥 is an even number

Let 𝑎= two, then 𝑃1𝑎= two is an even number

These 1-place predicates can be connected with the connectives from propositional logic.

Now, let’s say you wanted to say that everything is blue. To indicate the idea of everything we use the symbol ∀. A statement that uses this symbol is called a universally quantified statement. Also, what if you wanted to say that there are just some things that are blue. We usually say, “there exists a thing that is blue.” The symbol we use for there exist is ∃. A statement with that symbol is called an existentially quantified statement.

When we use them in a logical sentence, we put the variable to the right of these symbols and then a predicate with that variable next to it, like:

∀𝑥𝑃1𝑥

∃𝑥𝑃1𝑥

You can also relate one object with another (or itself) using a multi-place predicate. Like “x respects y,” or “x is between y and z.” The difference is the superscript used and how many variables you place on the right side of the capital letter (2-place predicate 𝑅2𝑥𝑦 or a 3-place predicate 𝐵3𝑥𝑦𝑧).

With this new formal system you can have more complicated logical arguments or use it in mathematical definitions and proofs.

Dialectic

Dialectic or dialectics, also known as the dialectical method, is at base a discourse between two or more people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to establish the truth through reasoned arguments

Russell’s Paradox

Consider the set of all sets that are not members of themselves. Is that set a member of itself?

i.e.

A barber shaves ALL and ONLY those men that shave themselves. Does the barber shave himself?

Unfortunately for Frege, Russell noticed a fatal contradiction in Frege’s system just as Frege was publishing the second half of the work.

Russell’s paradox, which Frege admitted his logic never recovered from:

If we say that a set contains all things except itself, does it contain itself or not?

If it doesn’t contain itself, it qualifies as a member of the set, as it contains all things except itself, and if it does contain itself, then it doesn’t qualify, but it contradicts its original definition, as a thing that doesn’t contain itself.

Logical Atomism

Logical atomism is a philosophy that originated in the early 20th century with the development of analytic philosophy.

Its principal exponent was the British philosopher Bertrand Russell.

It is also widely held that the early work of his Austrian-born pupil and colleague, Ludwig Wittgenstein, defend a version of logical atomism.

Bertrand Russell (1872–1970) described his philosophy as a kind of “logical atomism”, by which he meant to endorse both a metaphysical view and a certain methodology for doing philosophy.

The metaphysical view amounts to the claim that the world consists of a plurality of independently existing things exhibiting qualities and standing in relations.

According to logical atomism, all truths are ultimately dependent upon a layer of atomic facts, which consist either of a simple particular exhibiting a quality, or multiple simple particulars standing in a relation.

The methodological view recommends a process of analysis, whereby one attempts to define or reconstruct more complex notions or vocabularies in terms of simpler ones.

This process often reveals that what we take to be brute necessities are instead purely logical. According to Russell, at least early on during his logical atomist phase, such an analysis could eventually result in a language containing only words representing simple particulars, the simple properties and relations thereof, and logical constants, which, despite this limited vocabulary, could adequately capture all truths.

Russell’s logical atomism had a profound influence on analytic philosophy in the first half of the 20th century; indeed, it is arguable that the very name “analytic philosophy” derives from Russell’s defense of the method of analysis.

Russell wrote, “the business of philosophy, as I conceive of it, is essentially that of logical analysis, followed by logical synthesis.” We should take things completely apart, into their basic components to atomize them into the fundamental pieces, and then build up the thing into the combinations of the parts that show how it works in all of its possibilities.

This follows the entire project of Hegel, but in total rejection of contradiction, which Hegel sees in every step. For Russell, analysis is less definition than reduction. Logical reconstruction substitutes known, certain entities for unknown, unsure ones, until the whole is analyzed, and then synthesizes out of basics that can be sensed in the world, a position Russell called Logical Atomism.

Unfortunately, there is a problem of whether or not we can atomize things entirely that can be called Wittgenstein’s broom.

Russell’s protege argued in his later work that if we call for a broom, we are calling for the broom handle and brush, but not separately, so we are calling for all of the atoms in the broom, but not that way, or for any atomic purpose.

In the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein suggests that the pieces in a chess game could be atomized and categorized differently as the game goes on with interests and positions shifting, such that sometimes a valuable piece would be best, and other times a piece that can jump over others becomes far more valuable than the piece with the higher score.

Unless we can compartmentalize contexts, this could be a fatal flaw to Russell’s Logical Atomism, even if the shifting situations can, moment by moment, be atomized in particular passing contexts.

Sentential Logic

Propositional calculus is a branch of logic. It is also called propositional logic, statement logic, sentential calculus, sentential logic, or sometimes zeroth-order logic. It deals with propositions and argument flow. Compound propositions are formed by connecting propositions by logical connectives.

Philology

Philology is the study of language in oral and written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics.

Philology is more commonly defined as the study of literary texts as well as oral and written records, the establishment of their authenticity and their original form, and the determination of their meaning

Positivism

Positivism is a philosophical theory stating that certain knowledge is based on natural phenomena and their properties and relations. Thus, information derived from sensory experience, interpreted through reason and logic, forms the exclusive source of all certain knowledge.

Logical Positivism aka Logical Empiricism aka Neopositivism

Logical positivism, also called logical empiricism, a philosophical movement that arose in Vienna in the 1920s and was characterized by the view that scientific knowledge is the only kind of factual knowledge and that all traditional metaphysical doctrines are to be rejected as meaningless.

Logical positivism, later called logical empiricism, and both of which together are also known as neopositivism, was a movement in Western philosophy whose central thesis was the verification principle.

Also called verificationism, this would-be theory of knowledge asserted that only statements verifiable through direct observation or logical proof are meaningful. Everything else is senseless and/or metaphysics.

An idea is verifiable if you can, at least in principle, show that it is true. The idea is that if an idea isn't verifiable, it's not really meaningful in any practical sense. An example of an unverifiable claim would be something like "What if I perceive the color red the way you perceive the color blue?"

Making the claim that metaphysical claims are meaningless is itself a metaphysical assertion.

The central tenant of verification theory to make something meaningful causes problems for them. What can be wrong about saying something is meaningless unless it’s verifiable?

Karl Popper (and A.J. Ayers years later) pointed out that if you believe that verification makes something meaningful and you want to remain logically consistent not only do you have to throw out religion and unverifiable philosophy, if you want to remain consistent you have to throw out all of science as well. Because science isn’t verifiable. More specifically the scientific laws and theories that we get from conducting experiments are not verifiable and Popper doesn’t take credit for this. He says Hume showed us this centuries ago with his classic example about white swans. A defining and important characteristic of all scientific laws and theories that we create from the result of experiments that we run. No matter how many experiments you run, no matter how many ‘white swans’ you see, general conclusions about how the way things are can never be something that is verifiable empirically or logically, synthetically or analytically. You cannot use your senses to defend a statement like all swans are white and you certainly can’t defend a statement like that only using formal logic, and as Hume points out, so to with every scientific theory that will ever be produced. Does this make science any less awesome or useful…no…Karl Popper would immediately go on to say that the role of induction and scientific experiments is not to verify or confirm scientific theories but to falsify or disconfirm scientific theories that are wrong. None of this makes science invalid, all this means is that if you’re a logical positivist, you would have to throw out all science as meaningless which is a big problem for them.

along with Keynes view on the two dogmas of empiricism…Analytic and synthetic divide is a myth, perhaps there is a mix of a priori, a posterori…raw sense data is incomprehensible without a framework or point of reference to make ‘sense’ of it….listen to podcast

The problem with verificationism is that it verification is often impractical (to say the least). You can't verify the statement "all protons have elementary charge" without testing every single proton. One can see where verification might not be the scientist's favorite goal. Enter falsificationism, where the important thing is that you can prove it wrong. We provisionally assume that all protons have elementary charge based on theory and data, but in principle we allow for the possibility that the theory can be disproved by compelling evidence that there are (say) protons with a charge of 2e.

Logical positivism has problems with verification because as Karl Popper showed you would have to throw out all of science

showed with the white swan analogy, shows if there is no verifiability in science you have to to believe with a logical positive believe you have and throughout all science

I can see why ID folks would want to return to verificationism. ID is out because it's not falsifiable - no matter how much data you find, the intelligent designer can always retreat into some gap in our knowledge. ID proponents want to avoid challenges to come up with a falsifiable version of ID because they don't have one and I doubt they ever will. Enter the latest tack: If they won't let us call ourselves science, let's redefine science. If we switch back to verificatonism, then ID can call itself a science. In principle, it is verifiable - maybe tomorrow God will appear in the sky and make it very clear to all of humanity that he's behind everything. And since we wouldn't be requiring falsifiablity anymore, there would be no need to find a way to actively test intelligent design. The fact that we might get our proof by having God show us all how he did it is good enough.

Falsifiability

A claim is falsifiable if some observation might show it to be false. For example, in order to verify the claim "All swans are white" one would have to observe every swan; but the observation of a single black swan would be sufficient to falsify the claim.

Pseudoscience

Pseudoscience consists of statements, beliefs, or practices that are claimed to be both scientific and factual but are incompatible with the scientific method.

Sometimes what is defined pseudoscience turns the tables e.g. Copernicus, Galileo, Pasteur, Newton, Einstein…

Eidetic

Of, relating to, or marked by extraordinarily detailed and vivid recall of visual images.

Pertaining to a memory or mental image of perfect clarity, as though actually visible; or to a person able to see such memories.

of visual imagery of almost photographic accuracy

Eidetic Reduction

Platonism

Claims about the nature of meaning

Disagreement:

Platonists: meanings are abstract objects

Nominalists: meanings are concrete objects

Frege is a Platonists about meanings

Sentences meanings and thoughts are abstract objects

Nominalism

Claims about the nature of meaning

Meanings are identical to some concrete object

i.e. properties of marks on paper

nothing more to meaning than physical

Disagreement:

Platonists: meanings are abstract objects

Nominalists: meanings are concrete objects

Frege disagrees, thinks that thought is abstract

The significance of our works/expressions are abstract

Immanence

The doctrine or theory of immanence holds that the divine encompasses or is manifested in the material world.

It is held by some philosophical and metaphysical theories of divine presence.

Immanence is usually applied in monotheistic, pantheistic, pandeistic, or panentheistic faiths to suggest that the spiritual world permeates the. It is often contrasted with theories of transcendence, in which the divine is seen to be outside the material world.

Materialism

Materialism is a monist position and maintains that primary reality is physical, the mind being the physical and functional properties of the brain, and having a scientific explanation. Consciousness has a physical basis and is an epiphenomenon in that it derives from brain activity. An objective world exists independently of the observer. This reductive materialism remains the dominant paradigm for the world’s scientific community and positivist research generally. Neuroscientists are seeking the neural correlates of consciousness and believe they will ultimately identify the physical source of mental experience. The frustrating anomaly for the current paradigm is consciousness itself; it cannot be doubted and yet it cannot be explained.

Metaphysics

Metaphysics is the branch of philosophy that examines the fundamental nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and matter, between substance and attribute, and between potentiality and actuality.

The word "metaphysics" comes from two Greek words that, together, literally mean "after or behind or among [the study of] the natural".

This is an excellent question, and deserves more discussion than I can really provide here, but I'll try to give a simple and clear delineation between the two fields.

Versus Ontology:

Pragmatism

Pragmatism is a philosophical tradition that began in the United States around 1870. Its origins are often attributed to the philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, and John Dewey.

Peirce later described it in his pragmatic maxim: "Consider the practical effects of the objects of your conception.

Nihilism

Nihilism was a widespread school of philosophy that emerged during the 18th and 19th centuries throughout much of Europe and beyond. Conversationally we might talk about Nihilism as a gloomy, pessimistic school, whose leaders rejected the moralism of religion, instead believing in absolutely nothing and no-one. This is essentially true, but it is also an oversimplification. In reality, Nihilism was a widespread, complex, and broad-ranging way of thinking about the world. In order to understand the great complexity of Nihilism, philosophers often divide the school into five main fields of study. We examine the five key theories of Nihilism in our handy list below.

Existential Nihilism bears some similarities with the 19th and 20th century school of Existentialism, but the two are still markedly distinct from one another. Both schools rejected religion and other authoritarian forces that had once dominated the way we lived out our lives. Existential Nihilists gloomily thought that without any moral codes to hold us in place, human life was essentially meaningless and pointless. By contrast, the Existentialists thought the individual had the power to find their own meaningful path through the absurd complexity of life, but only if they are brave enough to go out looking for it.

Cosmic Nihilism is one of the more extreme theories of Nihilism. Its leaders look out into the wider universe, arguing that the cosmos is so vast and unintelligible that it acts as evidence of our minute insignificance. Cosmic Nihilists noted how the universe is completely indifferent to our daily lives, thus reinforcing the argument that nothing we do matters at all, so why bother believing in anything or anyone? Some even went a stage further, arguing that the things like love, family, freedom and happiness we hold on to so tightly are merely distractions to divert us away from the underlying truth that we are all just waiting to die.

In contrast with the two theories of Nihilism discussed above, Ethical Nihilists focused specifically on the questions around morality. They argued that there was no such thing as an objective right or wrong. Ethical Nihilism is usually divided into the three sub-categories: Amoralism – a complete rejection of moral principles, Egoism – a view that the individual should only be concerned for themselves and their own private and interests, and Moral Subjectivism – the idea that moral judgements are up to the individual to choose, rather than being dictated by an outside authoritarian force such as religion or government, even if they don’t make sense to anyone else.

If Epistemology is the philosophy of knowledge, Epistemological Nihilists were concerned with what knowledge was. They argued that knowledge is a false construct based on another person’s point of view, rather than unquestionable fact. Their philosophy might be best summed up with the phrase “we can’t know.” Instead, they argued that nothing is really known at all, and we should instead take a skeptical approach to life’s supposed truths, questioning everything around us and asking whether it has any meaning at all.

As you might guess, Political Nihilism was concerned with the nature of politics and government. This strand of Nihilism tore down all pre-existing institutions that try to dictate how we live out our lives, including religion, political institutions and even social clubs and organizations. Its leading thinkers argued that we should question any higher authority that attempts to dictate how we live our lives. They emphasized that all these controlling institutions were corrupt and had their own agenda, so we should remain deeply suspicious of, and skeptical about their motives.

Ignosticism

Ignosticism or igtheism is the idea that the question of the existence of God is meaningless because the word "God" has no coherent and unambiguous definition.

The position that there are many different, contradictory definitions for the word "God", so one can't claim to be a theist OR an atheist until one knows which definition is meant.

Furthermore, if the chosen definition is incoherent and makes no predictions that can be empirically tested, then it doesn't matter whether one believes in it or not, for how can something meaningless be true OR false? (this last part is also known as theological noncognitivism).

Neo-Kantianism

By its broadest definition, the term ‘Neo-Kantianism’ names any thinker after Kant who both engages substantively with the basic ramifications of his transcendental idealism and casts their own project at least roughly within his terminological framework. In this sense, thinkers as diverse as Schopenhauer, Mach, Husserl, Foucault, Strawson, Kuhn, Sellers, Nancy, Korsgaard, and Friedman could loosely be considered Neo-Kantian. More specifically, ‘Neo-Kantianism’ refers to two multifaceted and internally-differentiated trends of thinking in the late Nineteenth and early Twentieth-Centuries: the Marburg School and what is usually called either the Baden School or the Southwest School. The most prominent representatives of the former movement are Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, and Ernst Cassirer. Among the latter movement are Wilhelm Windelband and Heinrich Rickert. Several other noteworthy thinkers are associated with the movement as well.

Neo-Kantianism was the dominant philosophical movement in German universities from the 1870's until the First World War. Its popularity declined rapidly thereafter even though its influences can be found on both sides of the Continental/Analytic divide throughout the twentieth century. Sometimes unfairly cast as narrowly epistemological, Neo-Kantianism covered a broad range of themes, from logic to the philosophy of history, ethics, aesthetics, psychology, religion, and culture. Since then there has been a relatively small but philosophically serious effort to reinvigorate further historical study and programmatic advancement of this often neglected philosophy.

Transcendental idealism

Transcendental idealism is a doctrine founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century.

Kant's doctrine is found throughout his Critique of Pure Reason.

Kant argues that the conscious subject cognizes objects not as they are in themselves, but only the way they appear to us under the conditions of our sensibility.

Nominalism

Nominalism is a philosophical view which comes at least in two varieties. In one of them it is the rejection of abstract objects, in the other it is the rejection of universals

Theory that there are no universal essences in reality and that the mind can frame no single concept or image corresponding to any universal or general term.

You use nominal to indicate that someone or something is supposed to have a particular identity or status, but in reality does not have it. As he was still not allowed to run a company, his wife became its nominal head. A nominal price or sum of money is very small in comparison with the real cost

Realism

In metaphysics, realism about a given object is the view that this object exists in reality independently of our conceptual scheme.

In philosophical terms, these objects are ontologically independent of someone's conceptual scheme, perceptions, linguistic practices, beliefs, etc.

Semantics

Semantics is the linguistic and philosophical study of meaning in language, programming languages, formal logics, and semiotics.

It is concerned with the relationship between signifiers—like words, phrases, signs, and symbols—and what they stand for in reality, their denotation.

Semiotics

Semiotics is the study of sign process, which is any form of activity, conduct, or any process that involves signs, including the production of meaning. A sign is anything that communicates a meaning, that is not the sign itself, to the interpreter of the sign.

Epistemology

Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with the theory of knowledge.

Naturalism

Naturalism, in philosophy, a theory that relates scientific method to philosophy by affirming that all beings and events in the universe (whatever their inherent character may be) are natural. Consequently, all knowledge of the universe falls within the pale of scientific investigation.

Compatibilism

Compatibilism is the belief that free will and determinism are mutually compatible and that it is possible to believe in both without being logically inconsistent.

Compatibilists believe freedom can be present or absent in situations for reasons that have nothing to do with metaphysics.

Compatibilism offers a solution to the free will problem, which concerns a disputed incompatibility between free will and determinism. Compatibilism is the thesis that free will is compatible with determinism. Because free will is typically taken to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility, compatibilism is sometimes expressed as a thesis about the compatibility between moral responsibility and determinism.

Philosopher Bio’s

Thales

Pre-Socrates Ionian

Anaximander

Pre-Socrates Ionian

Teacher of Pythagoras

Democritus

Pre-Socrates Ionian

Atomism

Everything consists of atoms and empty space (void)

There is no afterlife, atoms get carried away to become other things

Stoicism

The universe is transformation, life is opinion.

What does this mean? Transformation involves change, the ephemeral, impermanence. For the Stoics, opinion means our judgements and attitudes towards the world. For example, when Epictetus says that it is our opinions that we have under our control, he is referring to our beliefs.

The philosophy asserts that virtue (such as wisdom) is happiness and judgment should be based on behavior, rather than words. That we don’t control and cannot rely on external events, only ourselves and our responses.

Stoicism differs from most existing schools in one important sense: its purpose is practical application. It is not a purely intellectual enterprise.

A Stoic cultivates the four main virtues, Wisdom, Courage, Justice and Temperance (self-contol).

We have control over how we approach things, rather than imagining a perfect world – a utopia – the Stoic practices realism and deals with the world as it is - no strings attached, while pursuing one’s personal development through the four fundamental virtues:

Wisdom: understand the world without prejudice, logically and calmly

Courage: facing daily challenges and struggles with no complaints

Justice: treating others fairly even when they have done wrong

Temperance: which is voluntary self-restraint or moderation – where an individual refrains from doing something by sheer will power

Moderation…EVEN in moderation! Splurge or go crazy every now and then…but in moderation.

Extremism or fanaticism generally leads to a negative outcome.

People who cultivate these virtues can bring positive change in themselves and in others.

In the Stoic view, acts themselves are neither virtuous or non-virtuous. It's all about the reason why the action was chosen, and what the intent was. Sometimes a seemingly un-virtuous act is chosen for virtuous reasons, an sometimes a seemingly virtuous act is chosen for vicious ones.

One way that we can reasonably draw the line is to take the view from above, and consider how we'd feel if it was other people stealing instead of us. How is that to be justly treated? I'd hope a person would beg before they would steal. There is no disgrace to act honestly for help when it is needed.

Stoicism is very practical, it can be practiced all the time. Amor fati, love everything that happens, live in the moment, be courageous. All this virtues are accessible to you right now and there is no need for them to be approved, they don’t seek nor need approval to be practiced , so what are you waiting for to live correctly and proudly?

Amor fati and memento mori and two wings of the same bird for me.

Why is Meditations so straightforward and easy to read? It’s because Marcus was writing to help himself. Why does Epictetus seem so conversational? It’s because that’s literally what he was doing. He didn’t “write” anything—what survives to us are essentially transcripts of conversations he had with students. Think about Seneca writing his letters. There was a real person on both sides of that communique, a writer and a recipient. True friends trying to help each other by being clear, not confusing.

When the stoics say "Live in accordance with nature" they don't at all mean literal nature as we see it today. They mean live in accordance with the rational will of the universe, or logos or providence. And we can do that by aligning our rational will with natures will. So if nature determines I will lose my job, i will not complain

Rational will of the universe, or logos or providence AKA Nature or Tao or Universal Consciousness or God.

Worry

Is the worry fixable or not?

If you can fix it, why worry?

If you can’t fix it, then why worry?

Insults

Is the ‘insult’ true or nonsense?

If it is truth, why be offended?

If it I nonsense why be offended?

Each of the “things” we encounter in life will fall into one and only one if three three categories.

Things over which we have complete control, things over which we have some but not complete control and things over which we have no control at all

Cynicism

Cynicism is a school of philosophy from the Socratic period of ancient Greece, which holds that the purpose of life is to live a life of Virtue in agreement with Nature (which calls for only the bare necessities required for existence). This means rejecting all conventional desires for health, wealth, power and fame, and living a life free from all possessions and property.

Cynics lived in the full glare of the public's gaze and aimed to be quite indifferent in the face of any insults which might result from their unconventional behavior. They saw part of their job as acting as the watchdog of humanity, and to evangelize and hound people about the error of their ways, particularly criticizing any show of greed, which they viewed as a major cause of suffering. Many of their ideas (see the section on the doctrine of Cynicism for more details) were later absorbed into Stoicism.

The founder of Cynicism as a philosophical movement is usually considered to be Antisthenes (c. 445 - 365 B.C.), who had been one of the most important pupils of Socrates in the early 5th Century B.C. He preached a life of poverty, but his teachings also covered language, dialogue and literature in addition to the pure Ethics which the later Cynics focused on.

Antisthenes was followed by Diogenes of Sinope, who lived in a tub on the streets of Athens, and ate raw meat, taking Cynicism to its logical extremes. Diogenes dominates the story of Cynicism like no other figure, and he came to be seen as the archetypal Cynic philosopher. He dedicated his life to self-sufficiency ("autarkeia"), austerity ("askesis") and shamelessness ("anaideia"), and was famed for his biting satire and wit.

Crates of Thebes (c. 365 - 285 B.C.), who gave away a large fortune so he could live a life of poverty in Athens, was another influential and respected Cynic of the period. Other notable Greek Cynics include Onesicritus (c. 360 - 290 B.C.), Hipparchia (c. 325 B.C.), Metrocles (c. 325 B.C.), Bion of Borysthenes (c. 325 - 255 B.C.), Menippus (c. 275 B.C.), Cercidas (c. 250 B.C.) and Teles (c. 235 B.C.).

With the rise of Stoicism in the 3rd Century B.C., Cynicism as a serious philosophical activity underwent a decline, and it was not until the Roman era that there was a Cynic revival. Cynicism spread with the rise of Imperial Rome in the 1st Century A.D., and Cynics could be found begging and preaching throughout the cities of the Roman Empire, where they were treated with a mixture of scorn and respect. Cynicism seems to have thrived into the 4th Century A.D., unlike Stoicism, which had long declined by that time. Notable Roman Cynics include Demetrius (c. 10 - 80 A.D.), Demonax (c. 70 - 170 A.D.), Oenomaus (c. 120 A.D.), Peregrinus Proteus (c. 95 - 167 A.D.) and Sallustius (c. 430 - 500 A.D.).

Cynicism finally disappeared in the late 5th Century A.D., although many of its ascetic ideas and rhetorical methods were adopted by early Christians.The original cynicism was a philosophical movement likely founded by Antisthenes, a student of Socrates, and popularized by Diogenes of Sinope around the fifth century B.C. It was based on a refusal to accept the assumptions and habits that discourage people from questioning conventional dogmas, and thus hold us back from the search for deep wisdom and happiness. Whereas a modern cynic might say, for instance, that the president is an idiot and thus his policies aren’t worth considering, the ancient cynic would examine each policy impartially.

The modern cynic rejects things out of hand (“This is stupid”), while the ancient cynic simply withholds judgment (“This may be right or wrong”). “Modern cynicism [has] come to describe something antithetical to its previous meanings, a psychological state hardened against both moral reflection and intellectual persuasion.

The ancient cynics strove to live by a set of principles characterized by mindfulness, detachment from worldly cravings, the radical equality of all people, and healthy living. If this sounds like Christianity or even Buddhism, it should: Greek philosophers, including skeptics, who were contemporaries of the cynics, were probably influenced by Indian traditions when they visited the subcontinent with Alexander the Great, and in the following centuries, the ideas of cynicism and its offshoot stoicism heavily influenced early Christian thought.

Diogenes

“My tongue swore an oath, but my mind remained unsworn”

When his enemies condemned him to exile, he replied that he had condemned them to stay where they are.

When reproached for past bad behavior: “And there was once a day when I would piss in my bed but no longer.”

When the King (Alexander the Great) greeted him and asked him if there is anything he wanted, he said, “Yes, that you should stand a little out of my sin.” Alexander was so impressed with this , by the arrogance and grandeur of spirit of a man who could treat him with such disdain, that he said that if he were not Alexander he would be Diogenes. Diogenes replied that if he were not Diogenes that he would like to be Diogenes too.

When asked what he had gained from his philosophy he said, “To be able to associate without fear with all whom I encounter.”

Zeno

Pre-Socrates Ionian

Creator of paradoxes

To get somewhere you must pass the halfway point which can be divided into infinity

Schopenhauer

“Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”

~ On The Freedom Of The Will (1839)

“Talent is like the marksman who hits a target which others cannot reach; genius is like the marksman who hits a target, as far as which others cannot even see.”

~ On Genius', The World as Will and Representation Volume 2 (1844)

“To be alone is the fate of all great minds.”

~Our Relation to Ourselves” Counsels and Maxims (1851)

“Every man takes the limits of his own field of vision for the limits of the world.”

~Futher Psychological Observations', Studies in Pessimism (1851)

“This actual world of what is knowable, in which we are and which is in us, remains both the material and the limit of our consideration.”

~'Fourth Book. The World As Will', The World as Will and Representation Volume 1 (1819)

“The wise in all ages have always said the same things, and the fools, who at all times form the immense majority, have in their way too acted alike, and done just the opposite; and so it will continue.”

~ 'Introduction', The Wisdom of Life (1851)

“Men are by nature merely indifferent to one another; but women are by nature enemies.”

~'On Women', Studies in Pessimism (1851)

“Will without intellect is the most vulgar and common thing in the world, possessed by every blockhead, who, in the gratification of his passions, shows the stuff of which he is made.”

~'Personality, or What a Man Is', The Wisdom of Life (1851)

Schopenhauer is perhaps most famous for his extreme pessimism.

We constantly want things and therefore are doomed – whether by the anguish of not having what we want or by the boredom of already having it.

Seeing the world as something horrific and bleak, he urged that we turn against it. As a follower of Immanuel Kant, he took s

pace, time, and causality to be, not things-in-themselves, but categories of the mind through which we interpret and make sense of things.

However, in contrast to Kant, Schopenhauer argued that reality must ultimately be one, a single unified whole which essentially involves "Will".

There are several remarkable things about him, including the fact that he was the only major Western philosopher to draw serious and interesting parallels between Western and Eastern thought, as well as being the first major philosopher to openly identify as an atheist.

He had a significant influence on many great thinkers and artists, including Nietzsche, Freud, Wittgenstein, and Wagner. The arts were particularly important for Schopenhauer as well, not only because he thought they give us a glimpse into the underlying reality, but because they help us to escape our individuality and thus the inherent suffering and meaningless absurdity of existence.

Schopenhauer independently came to the conclusion that all is one (same conclusion as the Upshaniads) preceded Freud on the ‘discovery’ preceded unconscious and Einstein on mass-energy equivalence from pure rational reason.

This is frankly astonishing.

The 'Will,' which is the underlying force that animates all things and drives the universe forward, the ultimate reality which is beyond the grasp of human understanding and can only be experienced through intuition.

It seems that Schopenhauer's view is that the importance of religion lies not in its specific beliefs or practices but in its ability to provide individuals with a glimpse of the ultimate reality (the 'Will') and to help them develop a deeper understanding of themselves and their place in the world, the idea that all things are interconnected and part of a single, ultimate reality.

Schopenhauer was a major influence on Nietzsche, Freud and Wittgenstein.

A number of thinkers have believed that the concept of the will is crucial to the understanding of law, ethics, and human behavior generally; a few have suggested that it is crucial to the understanding of reality itself. Such suggestions are found in the philosophies of Fichte, Henri Bergson, and others, but in no philosophy does it have such central importance as in that of Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer thought that will is the underlying and ultimate reality and that the whole phenomenal world is only the expression of will. He described living things as the objectifications of their wills and sought to explain not only the behavior but also the very anatomical structures of plants, animals, and men in terms of this hypothesis. The will was described by Schopenhauer as a blind and all-powerful force that is literally the inexhaustible creator of every visible thing. The sexual appetite, which he considered to be fundamentally the same in all living things, was described by him as a blind urge to live and to perpetuate existence without any goal beyond that, and he denied that it had anything whatever to do with reason or intelligence, being in fact more often than not opposed to them. The religious impulse found in all cultures at all times was similarly explained as the response to a blind and irrational will to possess endless existence. In the growth and development of all living things Schopenhauer discerned the unfolding of the will in nature, wherein certain things appear and transform themselves in accordance with a fairly unvarying pattern and in the face of obstacles and impediments, solely in accordance with what is willed in a metaphysical sense but entirely without any rational purpose or goal. On the basis of this voluntarism, he explained ethics in terms of the feelings of self-love, malice, and compassion, all of which are expressions of the will, and he denied—in sharp contrast to Kant—that morality has anything to do with reason or intelligence. He argued that men have free will only in the sense that every man is the free or unfettered expression of a will and that men are therefore not the authors of their own destinies, characters, or behavior. Like other voluntarists, Schopenhauer thus emphasized the irrational factors in human behavior and, in doing so, anticipated much that is now taken for granted in those sophisticated circles that have come under the influence of modern psychological theories.

First, he sees a constant striving in life. In our life we have things we work towards whether consciously or unconsciously. However, is there ever a point of non-striving? A point of rest? Even in retirement wouldn't we be striving to have a good retirement? It seems as though there is no point in our life where we aren't striving after something.

Secondly, Schopenhauer posits the attitude that life is merely a disruptive bump in the "calm of nothingness". Essentially, before we were born and after we die we are in this state of nothingness where stress and suffering can't harm us because there is no "us" to experience it. Life, on the other hand, provides the opportunity for us to suffer.

Finally, Schopenhauer addresses the question of happiness by thinking of happiness not as a positive phenomenon but rather as the absence of suffering. Suffering on the other hand is a positive phenomenon. He gives an example of how we aren't usually conscious about how healthy our body is but our attention races towards any small irritation that body may face.

Practically, this conception of life might lead one to be kinder to others. If life is suffering, then we're all fellow sufferers in need of care and compassion from one another. Schopenhauer described the Will to Live as a “blind incessant impulse, ” the ultimate, singular, and undefinable object of our most primordial instincts that dictates the existence of both organic and inorganic matter. The Will is insatiable, pointing us toward a destination we can never reach yet which we continue to move toward.

This irony is the root cause of all suffering. In Buddhist fashion, he argued that — in order to be truly at peace with ourselves — we had to break with the Will and the things that made us human.

He proposes that asceticism — the indefinite renunciation of all instinct and desire — is the easiest and most effective way of doing so, it is not for everyone. Fortunately, those who do not wish to live the rest of their lives as monks can still find a temporary release from the suffering of the Will and this release can be found in music. When we listen to music, we are able to lose track of ourselves, and in doing so, become free from the struggles of our daily lives.

In my interpretation, Schopenhauer argued that we usually only experience the 'Will' indirectly, through its manifestations in the world. For example, we experience the 'Will' through our own desires and actions, as well as through the actions of others and the natural world around us.

However, Schopenhauer also believed that we can have moments of direct insight into the 'Will', where we become aware of the 'Will' as the underlying force behind all of our experiences.

This direct experience of the Will is rare and difficult to achieve and I believe can be experienced during Wu Wei (aka Flow State or The Zone), in which our actions are quite effortlessly in alignment with the flow of life. In the state of Wu Wei, one is relaxed and free yet focused, time vanishes, we totally forget anything around us and we are one with our actions, our 'Will'.

In moments of intense contemplation we lose our normal sense of self as an individual striving after ends and employing cognition as a means to attain them, and instead we 'mirror' the world passively, thereby coming to see the universal in the particular object of intuitive perception (rather than attaining knowledge of it through concepts or abstract reasoning). This kind of experience has a higher cognitive value than that of ordinary everyday consciousness, which is taken up with particular objects and their spatial, temporal and causal inter-connections. While this elevated contemplative consciousness lasts, our will is in abeyance. We do not seek to understand the object we perceive in relation to what it can do for us, whether we desire or need it, what associations it has with other objects or with our emotions:

“We stop considering the Where, When, Why and Wherefore of things but simply and exclusively consider the What. We devote the entire power of our mind to intuition and immerse ourselves in this entirely, letting the whole of consciousness be filled with peaceful contemplation of the natural object that is directly present, a landscape, a tree, a cliff, a building, or whatever it might be, and, according to a suggestive figure of speech, we lose ourselves in this object completely, i.e. we forget our individuality, our will, and continue to exist only as pure subject, the clear mirror of the object, so that it is as if the object existed on its own, without anyone to perceive it, and we can no longer separate the intuited from the intuition as the two have become one, and the whole consciousness is completely filled and engrossed by a single intuitive image.”

~ Schopenhauer

In such a state nothing troubles us, because no felt lack or need moves us at all.

Schopenhauer on Suffering: “All life is suffering”

Schopenhauer links together suffering and the “will-to-live” and thinks them form out of their togetherness. The “will-to-live” leads to infinite desires and endless striving. An endless desiring/striving that is frequently disrupted, negated, and forced into its failure to be realized.

“At all grades of its phenomenon, from lowest to the highest, the will disposes entirely with an ultimate aim and object. It always strives, because striving is its sole nature, to which no attained goal can put an end. Such striving is therefore incapable of final satisfaction.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, The World as Will and Representation

The will is always confirmed and affirmed because it seduces, it seduces us, yet that toward which it is turned constantly distances itself from us and abandons us in our disrupted and useless confirming of it.

This confirming/disrupting/abandoning always occurs and repeats itself because, according to Schopenhauer, we are a phenomenon of the will, resembling and similar to all the animals and plants, yet exceeding them and thus desiring more, and therefore suffering more.

The will fills us with an infinite striving and an endless desiring, to which there is no end. Yet it can also, only in its knowing of itself, deny itself and block this striving/desiring. This knowing belongs to and can only arise from the human existence itself.

“All life is suffering”

Suffering, for Schopenhauer, belongs to life and always appears when there is life or living. We are held within it and hold its source within ourselves as long as we live. “Suffering is essential to life, therefore does not flow in upon us from outside, but everyone carries around within himself its perennial source”.

Holding the source of suffering within ourselves means that suffering lies at the heart of life and existence and that suffering and pain are not accidental events, but rather essential, primary, and inevitable.

To the heart of existing belongs suffering. We are held within what we hold within ourselves. Neither can one escape the other nor can one live without the other. Happiness occurs, yet it fades away quickly, for it is what links together one suffering with another.

Since we are caught up within that whose source dwells in us, we see and notice the suffering of the other and miserably/happily congratulate ourselves that we have escaped that from which the other was not able to escape. How could this world be “the best of all possible worlds”?

We must, according to Schopenhauer, confirm and acknowledge the suffering lying at the heart of our existence. Only this acknowledging can lead to wisdom, for both we and suffering are always brought and delivered into each other. Thinking must begin from out of this inescapable togetherness.

Suffering is real, inevitable, and continuous; it appears unexpectedly and then disappears only to appear again and surprise us. That which happens between the disappearing and re-appearing of suffering is a short-lived happiness, a short-lived freedom from pain.

Schopenhauer does not oppose suffering to happiness and does not place them over against each other as equals. Suffering is continuous and fundamental, but happiness is the discontinuity linking together every suffering with another. Happiness is nothing but a distance taking place as a short-lived break, rendering continuous pain and suffering.

Life is another word for suffering, or suffering means life. The human existence, according to Schopenhauer, confirms this making equal of life and pain. That is, to the human condition belongs miseries and woes. There is nothing but wars, battlefields, exploitations, meanness, heartlessness, hatred, envy, injustice, racism, discrimination, infinitely.

Suffering and desiring

Suffering occurs when the will, taking place as infinite striving/desiring, is held back in its failure to reach that toward which it is turned. Suffering is the failure to realize that to which striving/desiring is directed. That is, suffering happens when there is an obstruction blocking and making impossible any progress toward a goal.

Happiness, on the other hand, occurs when a goal is reached and realized. Yet happiness fades away soon and quickly, for it is nothing but the beginning of a new striving/desiring: “Thus that there is no ultimate aim of striving means that there is no measure or end of suffering”. There is no escape from suffering.

Suffering and knowing

Human existence feels suffering the most because, unlike and more than any other animal, it has the ability to obtain knowledge and to know. Schopenhauer links together knowing and pain and says that knowledge increases and intensifies pain and suffering.

Knowing brings with it suffering, for it makes understandable, and it is only in this understanding that the ugly in existence shines and renders itself known. Even knowing that there exists suffering in the animal world brings about more pain and suffering, for it makes apparent that there is no escaping and that “all life is suffering”.

Suffering and death

Life takes place as a deferring of death, a postponing of the inevitable. Life is a death prevented and delayed. Death threatens and destabilizes human existence, makes it suffer, and causes it pain.

Suffering here occurs because the human existence, in its waiting for death and in its attempts at deferring it, endeavors to preserve itself. This preserving happens as a struggle. The place of this struggle is the body whose nourishing is seen as an attempt at postponing death. This is why Schopenhauer calls this will the “will-to-live”.

Schopenhauer’s bleak, thorough-going pessimism is exemplified in the claim that “nothing

else can be stated as the aim of our existence except the knowledge that it would be better for

us not to exist” (1844, p.605). This hostility towards existence is rooted in his metaphysics.

Drawing on Kantian thought, Schopenhauer proposes that behind the phenomenal world

represented to us by our senses, our life is propelled by an all-consuming will, which is the

fundamental reality of our lives. Furthermore, this will is one of endless striving and desiring,

never to be satisfied. In consequence, suffering is inescapable and ubiquitous; we are doomed

to exist in a permanent state of need and deficiency.

It might be argued that the pessimism of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer helped reveal to Nietzsche his own nihilism.

Tolstoy acknowledged Schopenhauer as one of his main inspirations.

Nietzsche

Reading Nietzsche is a transformative experience for me.

Nietzsche's philosophy is complex and multifaceted, and it is not always clear what his exact views were on certain topics.

More even than with most thinkers, people have taken very different sorts of things from Nietzsche.

This is partly a function of his style, which is epigrammatic, literary, and sometimes elusive to the point of enigma.

Nietzsche's aphoristic style, a fusion of poetry, metaphor and difficult concepts, pitched somewhere between allegory and literal statement, is a unique method making his writings prone to misreading and misinterpretation and ripe for misappropriation by eclectic causes and even opposing movements.

Nietzsche had a note-taking practice of transcribing whole passages of things that he was reading directly into his notebooks. This habit of Nietzsche's should furnish a reminder, for the more zealous and incautious among the Nachlass-citers, that Nietzsche's notebooks are precisely that, places where he is writing down notes, including a mixture of things, some of which he himself thinks, some of which he is toying with, and some of which he's simply read and copied out, with which he may or may not agree. His notebooks are not unpublished books of his ideas, and they should not be treated as such -- a warning that alas often goes unheeded.

His positions are often more complex than appears at first glance. For example, just because Nietzsche critiques something, does not mean that he is condemning it. Nietzsche loves the tension of oppositions, sometimes paradoxically seeming to affirm and negate each side.

It is important to understand the historical and cultural context in which Nietzsche lived and wrote, as this not only influenced his philosophy, it can affect the interpretation of his ideas.

While some of his views may be controversial or even offensive by today's standards, he was writing in a very different era than our own.

Some may criticize Nietzsche for not living the philosophy he espoused, however due to his tragic life of suffering perhaps it was not possible for him…or for most mere mortals.

“There is a false saying:” How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”

~ Zarathustra

Even flawed individuals can contribute to knowledge. Good ideas should be evaluated based on their own merits.

More on Reading Nietzsche

Nietzsche is often referred to as an ‘aphoristic’ writer, but this falls short of capturing the sheer variety of forms and styles he adopted. In fact, the number of genuine aphorisms in his works is relatively small; instead, most of what are called Nietzsche’s ‘aphorisms’ are more substantial paragraphs which exhibit a unified train of thought (frequently encapsulated in a paragraph heading indicating the subject matter), and it is from these building blocks that the other, larger structures are built in more or less extended sequences.

Nietzsche’s style, then, is very different from standard academic writing, from that of the ‘philosophical workers’ he describes so condescendingly in Beyond Good and Evil (BGE, 211). His aim is always to energize and enliven philosophical style through an admixture of aphoristic and, broadly speaking, ‘literary’ forms. His stylistic ideal, as he puts it on the title page of The Case of Wagner (parodying Horace), is the paradoxical one of ‘ridendo dicere severum’ (‘saying what is sombre through what is laughable’), and these two modes, the sombre and the sunny, are mischievously intertwined in his philosophy, without the reader necessarily being sure which is uppermost at any one time.

Nietzsche lays down a challenge to his readers, and sets them a pedagogical, hermeneutic task, that of learning to read him well. He acknowledges that the aphoristic form of his writing causes difficulty, and emphasizes that an aphorism has not been ‘deciphered’ simply when it has been read out; rather, for full understanding to take place, an ‘art of interpretation’ or exegesis is required (the German word is Auslegung, literally a laying out). He gives the attentive reader a hint of what kind of exegesis he thinks is needed when he claims that the Third Essay of the book ‘is a commentary on the aphorism that precedes it’ (he intends the opening section of the essay, not the epigraph from Zarathustra).

like art and music, meaning/justification of life is to be derived from inside itself...autotelic!!!!

main concepts

Social Constructionism - what we consider true or epistemic changes from time to time and place to place. Understanding this is the root of social critique. This isn't strictly Nietzschean but having it in your vocabulary will make a massive difference.

"God is Dead" - the foundational beliefs on which our social norms and customs, epistemology, justice and legal theory, and everything else are built are no longer believable, leaving everything built on that foundation poised to crumble. We believed there was a God when we built this thing, so we built it around him. Without God, we've built everything on nothing. We've opened a vacuum that could be filled will all kinds of nonsense.

Ressentiment - moralizing achievements and behaviors you are incapable of as "perverse" so you can feel morally superior to those who have what is inaccessible to you. For example, if you don't have any money you can avoid feeling inferior to the rich by declaring poverty to be a virtue ("The meek will inherit the earth"). Per Nietzsche, all morality is built on ressentiment.

Slave Morality vs. Master Morality - modes of morality at odds with each other. The slave moralizes the inherent goodness of their social position and the aristocrat does the same. This yields very different moralistic cultures with "slaves" venerating meekness and piety, and the "masters" venerating nobility and power.

Apollonian vs. Dionysian - a fragile balanced conflict between noble order and frenzied chaos. Expressions of art, in Nietzsche's mind, reveal the artist's coherence of this balance with Apollonianism manifesting as order and rationality and Dionysianism manifesting as the strength found in care-free individuality. You need both in your expression, even though they compete for the favor of the artist.

Eternal Recurrence - the awareness that one's life has no real beginning or end, and thus all choices and attitudes adopted in life are permanent. Think of it this way: you do not remember being born, and you will not remember dying. For you, there is only the infinite here and now. What you do matters because it isn't undone when you're gone. The version of reality that includes you is happening right now.

"How the true world finally became a fiction" - Before we had constructed and then believed a narrative about metaphysics and afterlives, we believed the world we lived in was the real one. We have since taught ourselves and each other that it isn't real and nothing real will ever happen until after you die. This is bullshit. You're in the real world.

once proclaimed, "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth." This quote encapsulates skepticism towards the notion of objective truth and highlights the inherent relationship between interpretation, power, and prevailing beliefs.

To understand Nietzsche's statement, we must delve into his philosophy of perspectivism. Nietzsche rejected the idea of absolute truth, arguing that there are no fixed, universally valid truths that exist independently of human perspectives. Instead, he posited that truth is contingent upon the interpretations and perspectives of individuals, shaped by their unique experiences, biases, and cultural contexts. Therefore, the understanding of truth becomes a subjective matter, varying from one individual or group to another.

Furthermore, Nietzsche emphasized the role of power in shaping interpretations and determining which perspective becomes dominant. In society, different groups and individuals hold varying degrees of power, be it political, economic, or social. Those in power often have the means to impose their interpretations on others, creating a hegemony of beliefs. The prevailing interpretation, according to Nietzsche, is not a reflection of objective truth but rather a product of power dynamics. The dominant group, through its influence and control, molds the narrative and suppresses alternative viewpoints.

This perspective challenges the traditional notion of truth as an objective and immutable entity. It unveils the underlying dynamics of power struggles and the influence they wield in shaping our understanding of reality. Nietzsche's quote suggests that the dominant interpretation of truth is not necessarily the most accurate or truthful one but rather a reflection of the interests and aspirations of those who hold power.

However, it is important to note that Nietzsche's assertion does not imply that truth itself is irrelevant or nonexistent. Rather, he argues that our access to truth is always mediated through interpretation, and these interpretations are influenced by power dynamics. Nietzsche's emphasis on the subjectivity of truth encourages critical thinking and questioning of dominant narratives. It urges individuals to challenge the prevailing interpretations and consider alternative viewpoints that may have been marginalized or suppressed.

In the modern world, Nietzsche's quote holds significant relevance. It reminds us to question the dominant narratives that shape our understanding of reality and to recognize the inherent biases and interests that may be at play. It encourages us to seek diverse perspectives, engage in critical discourse, and resist the temptation to accept the prevailing interpretation without scrutiny.

In conclusion, Nietzsche's quote, "All things are subject to interpretation. Whichever interpretation prevails at a given time is a function of power and not truth," underscores his philosophy of perspectivism and sheds light on the complex relationship between interpretation, power, and truth. It serves as a reminder to remain vigilant in our pursuit of knowledge and to challenge the prevailing interpretations that may be driven by power dynamics rather than a quest for objective truth.

Transvaluation of Values - comparing existing value systems, or inverting them, to get a better look at them. Nietzsche uses Buddhism and Christianity in a brilliant example. Christians deny human impulses as "sinful" (see: Ressentiment) and their highest value is the condemnation of sin. They suffer a great deal from this. Buddhists, on the other hand, eschew suffering and seek its avoidance as their highest value, yet they do not need to seek out sins to do so. When comparing the two, the self-indulgent benevolence of Christianity collapses as ridiculous. You can, and should, do this with any and all value systems especially the ones you might believe to be true or worthy of your piety.

Will to Power

Nietzsche was fairly clear about what will to power is. It is a description of life as that which strives to overcome itself. He also writes that what life wishes is to express its strength, which is in contrast to views of life as wishing to preserve itself as it is.

In the moral context, this means that every morality is a means of self-overcoming: for the individual to become greater than what they are now by subordinating their impulses to a higher goal. In psychology, this means that human actions are always aimed at the expression of strength. In terms of biology, it means that evolution isn’t a static process that creates enduring forms, but an endlessly moving character of life (a focus on the mutation/exception rather than the rule).

As far as a monistic metaphysical principle goes: this is a bit more complicated to explain, but in so many words we might say that Nietzsche isn’t claiming to have peeked behind the appearance of reality to perceive a unified essence. Instead, will to power is the principle he sees in the character of the world of appearance. It doesn’t depend on unity, but on irreconcilable differences. He sees a reality of striving forces with mutually exclusive goals that enter into conflict. For Nietzsche, the distinction between essence and appearance is abolished, and the real world reconsidered as the world of our experience.

Another intrepreation…..everyone, and everything everyone creates, is competing for influence. The Will to Power is a tongue-in-cheek unified theory of human behavior based on some of the other concepts above. The slave who allows himself to be convinced he is morally superior in his existence is merely a powerless individual attempting to reclaim some of their power, and thus their influence on their own perception. The wretched, even without realizing it, apply for your pity. Likewise, Nietzsche himself is admitting to wanting to persuade you of his way of thinking, just as you wish to persuade others to yours at the very least. At the very MOST, you're perfectly capable of getting into power struggles with others who are also vying for influence in just about any sphere of life and society.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He is famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity.

The Will to Power aka ‘der Wille zur Macht’

o The force by which all things in nature exert and expand their claim on existence

Morality

o The Higher Man

o Herd Morality

Beyond Good and Evil, he says: "Our highest insights must – and should – sound like follies and sometimes like crimes when they are heard without permission by those who are not predisposed and predestined for them."

Nihilism

Suffering

Truth

Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a straight line, no perfect circle or absolute magnitude.

~ Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things”, section 11

“The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact nothing is identical with anything else.

~ Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things”, section 19

Math does not correspond to the real world…failing the correspondence theory of truth.

Math is not truth as defined as defined by the correspondence theory.

Because it does not correspond with reality.

Or does it….?

The nature of Truth is fundamentally ambiguous

The nature of our reality, which is constantly subject to change, is thus ambiguous.

The nature of truth and the nature of reality are each fundamentally ambiguous thus corresponding to the correspondence theory of truth.

Thus, truth equals reality and is subjective and perspective dependent.

there isn’t an ultimate truth to be found in words - probably also because words can be understood in various ways

Limits: "All the different languages set alongside one another show that when it comes to words, truth full and adequate expression is never what matters, otherwise there wouldn't be so many languages. The thing in itself is utterly unintelligible, even for the creator of a language and certainly nothing to strive for, for he designates the relations of things to human beings and helps himself to the boldest metaphors. First to transfer nerve stimulus into an image, first metaphor. Then the image again copied in a sound, second metaphor. And each time a completely out of one sphere into an entirely new and different one...Every concept arises by means of equating the unequal."

Math is not truth??

Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a straight line, no perfect circle or absolute magnitude. (Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things”, section 11)

The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact nothing is identical with anything else. (Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things”, section 19)

The question is, how far an opinion is life-furthering, life-preserving, species-preserving, perhaps species-rearing, and we are fundamentally inclined to maintain that the falsest opinions (to which the synthetic judgments a priori belong), are the most indispensable to us, that without a recognition of logical fictions, without a comparison of reality with the purely imagined world of the absolute and immutable, without a constant counterfeiting of the world by means of numbers, man could not live.... (Beyond Good & Evil, "On the Prejudices of Philosophers", section 4)

§ Atomic facts: "What is a law of nature for us anyway? It is not known to us in itself but only in its effects in relation to other laws of nature, which are again known to us only as relations. All these relations in turn refer only to one another and are therefore thoroughly unintelligible to us in their essence"

§ Truths are tautological: "If someone hides a thing behind a bush, then looks for it and finds it again in the same place, the seeking and the findings are not much to brag about; yet this is how things stand with the seeking and finding of Truth in the realm of reason. If I give the definition of mammal, and then, after inspecting a camel I declare "A mammal!" a truth had been declared, but one of the limited value, by which I mean just contains not a single point that would be “true in itself," real and universally valid apart from man.

-Nietzsche

The Overman

Amor Fati

The Eternal Recurrence

Live life as if eternal recurrence

Amor Fati

God is dead

First mentioned in Zarathustra.

Morality is relative

On Free Will:

The notions of "free" and "determined" have no meaning if one dismisses with a Kantian justification of causality and an ego, or "soul-atomism" as Nietzsche calls it. Nietzsche considers causality to be a useful fiction which helped humans to survive (yet doesn't, for that reason, make it true. There's a note in WTP that says this explicitly). The problem with free will and determinism is that they tend to paint a picture of human action that has a stable ego/soul/"I" (think Descartes's cogito, and eventually Kant's Transcendental Ideal of Self), and this soul either moves itself, or is moved as a unitary "I" by a force outside of it. But for Nietzsche, the human being is not a unity; rather it's defined by a plurality of forces that "compete" for dominance. These forces don't compete for any conscious goal (and in fact, according to Nietzsche, no action that a human being takes is because of a motivation; the motivation follows the action. Check "The Four Great Errors" in Twilight of the Idols).

It's tough to conceptualize because we're used to feeling our selves as a unity. Chapter 1 of BG+E makes comments on this false unity. The human body (which is all that exists, as the "soul" is a fiction) is a field of forces in a hierarchy set by the most powerful drive. "We" then identify with the drive which wins in the competition, and say that "we" chose the action we took -- really it was just the drive.

In sum: We are fated, not because our "self" is determined by something outside, but because there isn't even a self. Whoever you are at the moment is the drive which dominates. You don't control the drive (hence no free will), because this would be the drive... "controlling" itself. Hope that makes sense, Nietzsche makes seemingly contradictory statements about will and causality that scholars can't agree on all the time.

“These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? – The rest are merely mankind.”

-‘The Antichrist’

“To become master of the chaos one is…that is the grand ambition here.”

-‘The Will To Power’

“Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!:

-‘The Antichrist’

“Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?”

-‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

‘The Herd Instinct’

Within every individual exists a ‘herd instinct’ – an innate need to obey and conform

‘Morality’

Designates what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ or ‘evil’

Since truth does not exist, finding the answer to the meaning of life is an impossibility.

“I undertook something that not everyone may undertake I descended into the depths, I bored into the foundation”

~preface, ‘Dawn of Morning’

A fear of descending…< See quote in book>…could engender permanent madness. He went mad!

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss , the abyss also gazes into you.”

~ Nietzsche

Why should we listen to a man who went mad?

“There is a false saying:” How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”

~ Nietzsche

Nietzsche (one of the first to cast doubt on Hegelian optimism) the question why has no answer anymore, God is dead we have killed him, he was the placeholder for our higher values.

§ Limits: "All the different languages set alongside one another show that when it comes to words, truth full and adequate expression is never what matters, otherwise there wouldn't be so many languages. The thing in itself is utterly unintelligible, even for the creator of a language and certainly nothing to strive for, for he designates the relations of things to human beings and helps himself to the boldest metaphors. First to transfer nerve stimulus into an image, first metaphor. Then the image again copied in a sound, second metaphor. And each time a completely out of one sphere into an entirely new and different one...Every concept arises by means of equating the unequal."

-Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Why did Nietzsche choose Zarathustra as his mouthpiece?

The historical Zarathustra/Zoroaster was the first prophet/philosopher. He was the father of the first monotheistic religion, the one who came up with the binary concept of Good/Evil, he originated the idea of Heaven/Hell, and the linear teleological view of time, that these struggles between good and evil will culminate in utopia at the end of history.

Zoroaster was a sort of ascetic who abandoned his parents in his 20's and had a revelation in his 30's. Nietzsche evidently identified with this.

“There is a false saying:” How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”

A beautiful mix of metaphor, poetry with literal concepts and unless you understand this it is easy to misread him.

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) was a German philosopher and cultural critic who published intensively in the 1870s and 1880s. He is famous for uncompromising criticisms of traditional European morality and religion, as well as of conventional philosophical ideas and social and political pieties associated with modernity.

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher, cultural critic, composer, poet, philologist, and Latin and Greek scholar whose work has exerted a profound influence on modern intellectual history. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy.

The Will to Power aka ‘der Wille zur Macht’

o The force by which all things in nature exert and expand their claim on existence

Morality

o The Higher Man

o Herd Morality

Nihilism

Suffering

Truth

Mathematics would certainly not have come into existence if one had known from the beginning that there was in nature no such thing as a straight line, no perfect circle or absolute magnitude.

~ Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things”, section 11

“The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact nothing is identical with anything else.

~ Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things”, section 19

Math does not correspond to the real world…failing the correspondence theory of truth.

Math is not truth as defined as defined by the correspondence theory.

Because it does not correspond with reality.

Or does it….?

The nature of Truth is fundamentally ambiguous

The nature of our reality, which is constantly subject to change, is thus ambiguous.

The nature of truth and the nature of reality are each fundamentally ambiguous thus corresponding to the correspondence theory of truth.

Thus, truth equals reality and is subjective and perspective dependent.

there isn’t an ultimate truth to be found in words - probably also because words can be understood in various ways

Math is not truth??

The laws of numbers assume there are identical things, but in fact nothing is identical with anything else. (Human, All Too Human, “Of First and Last Things”, section 19)

-Nietzsche

The Overman

Amor Fati

The Eternal Recurrence

Live life as if eternal recurrence

Amor Fati

God is dead

First mentioned in Zarathustra.

Morality is relative

“These alone are my readers, my rightful readers, my predestined readers: what do the rest matter? – The rest are merely mankind.”

-‘The Antichrist’

“To become master of the chaos one is…that is the grand ambition here.”

-‘The Will To Power’

“Morality is the best of all devices for leading mankind by the nose!:

-‘The Antichrist’

“Can you give yourself your own evil and your own good and hang your own will over yourself as a law?”

-‘Thus Spoke Zarathustra’

‘The Herd Instinct’

Within every individual exists a ‘herd instinct’ – an innate need to obey and conform

‘Morality’

Designates what is ‘good’ and what is ‘bad’ or ‘evil’

Since truth does not exist, finding the answer to the meaning of life is an impossibility.

“I undertook something that not everyone may undertake I descended into the depths, I bored into the foundation”

~preface, ‘Dawn of Morning’

A fear of descending…< See quote in book>…could engender permanent madness. He went mad!

“Battle not with monsters, lest ye become a monster, and if you gaze into the abyss , the abyss also gazes into you.”

~ Nietzsche

Why should we listen to a man who went mad?

“There is a false saying:” How can someone who can’t save himself save others?” Supposing I have the key to your chains, why should your lock and my lock be the same?”

~ Nietzsche

Nietzsche (one of the first to cast doubt on Hegelian optimism) the question why has no answer anymore, God is dead we have killed him, he was the placeholder for our higher values.

-Nietzsche

Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Why did Nietzsche choose Zarathustra as his mouthpiece?

Zoroaster was a sort of ascetic who abandoned his parents in his 20's and had a revelation in his 30's. Nietzsche evidently identified with this.

According to scholars Zarathustra was born around between 1500 and 500 BCE.

Descent to Madness?

His father died of a ‘brain ailment’.

Nietzsche himself had various illnesses throughout his life and suffered at least two strokes.

Referring to the individual who descends into the depths of the mind, Nietzsche wrote:

“He enters a labyrinth, and multiplies a thousandfold the dangers that life in itself brings with it – of which not the least is that nobody can see how and where he loses his way, becomes solitary, and is torn to pieces by some cave-minotaur of conscience.”

~ Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

“In the darkness of the unconscious a treasure lies hidden, the… “treasure hard to attain”…the fight against the paralyzing grip of the unconscious calls forth man’s creative powers…it needs heroic courage to do battle with these forces and to wrest from them the treasure hard to attain. Whoever succeeds in this has triumphed indeed.”

~ Carl Jung, Symbols of Transformation

“I was sitting at my desk…thinking over my fears. Then I let myself drop. Suddenly it was as though the ground literally gave way at my feet, and I plunged down into dark depths.”

~ Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“I stood helpless before an alien world; everything in it seemed difficult and incomprehensible. I was living in a constant state of tension; often I felt as if gigantic blocks of stone were tumbling down upon me.”

~ Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“It was most essential for me to have a normal life in the real world as a counterpoise to that strange inner world…The unconscious contents could have driven me out of my wits. But my family, and the knowledge: I have a medical diploma…I must help my patients, I have a wife and five children…these were actualities which made demands upon me and proved to me again and again that I really existed.”

~ Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“Nietzsche had lost the ground under his feet because he possessed nothing more than the inner world of his thoughts which incidentally possessed him more than he it. He was uprooted and hovered above the earth, and therefore he succumbed to exaggeration and irreality.”

~ Carl Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections

“…the approach or invasion of the unconscious can cause…a dangerous inflation, for one of the most obvious dangers is that of identifying with the figures in the unconscious. For anyone with an unstable disposition this may amount to a psychosis.” (Jung)

~ Carl Jung, Mysterium Coniunctionis

“There are two kinds of madness, one arising from human diseases, and the other from a divine release from the customary habits. . . ”

~ Plato, Phaedrus

“Madness, provided it comes as the gift of heaven, is the channel by which we receive the greatest blessings... the men of old who gave things their names saw no disgrace or reproach in madness; otherwise they would not have connected it with the name of the noblest of arts, the art of discerning the future, and called it the manic art... So, according to the evidence provided by our ancestors, madness is a nobler thing than sober sense... madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.”

~ Plato

“Madness is a divine release of the soul from the yoke of custom and convention.”

~ Plato

“Madness comes from God, whereas sober sense is merely human.”

~ Plato

“…[my] individuality itself seemed to dissolve and fade away into boundless being, and this not a confused state, but the clearest of the clearest, the weirdest of the weirdest, utterly beyond words, where death was an almost laughable impossibility, the loss of personality… seeming no extinction but the only true life.”

~ Alfred Tennyson, The Divine Mania by Yulia Ustinova

“…the reluctance to acknowledge that being in a non-ordinary state of consciousness is not synonymous to being mad is characteristic of our culture, which tends to medicalise the nonconformities, especially behavioural deviance. In historical and cultural situations different from the modern Western norm, people take for granted that a person may be out of his or her mind, but not crazy; for instance, in the traditional Inuit society a shaman while healing is not deemed mad. In our society, the idea that deviation from the normal state of consciousness may be beneficial is still considered by many extravagant, if not preposterous.”

~ Yulia Ustinova, Divine Mania: Alteration of Consciousness in Ancient Greece

“For instance, he once said to his sister: “Are we not quite happy?” – perfectly reasonably, and then he was gone…People have concluded…that his madness was a divine mania – what the Greeks called mania, a divine state, the state of being filled with the god; one is entheos, the god is within. The remark was quoted as evidence that he had reached a sort of nirvana condition.” (Nietzsche’s Zarathustra)

~ Carl Jung, Nietzsche’s Zarathustra

“Now all is still! The sea lies there pale and glittering, it cannot speak. The sky plays its everlasting silent evening game…it cannot speak. . . O sea, O evening! You are evil instructors! You teach man to cease being a man! Shall he surrender to you? Shall he become as you now are, pale, glittering, mute, tremendous, reposing above himself? Exalted above himself?”

~ Nietzsche, The Dawn of Day

“His coming brings madness.”, Walter Otto wrote, regarding Dionysus.

~ Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult

“The madness which is called Dionysus is no sickness, no disability in life, but a companion of life at its healthiest…[it is a madness] which ushers in primal salvation amid primal pain.”

~ Walter Otto, Dionysus: Myth and Cult

On the day of his break on January 3, 1889, Nietzsche penned the following in a letter:

“I come as the victorious Dionysus, who will make the earth a festival.”

~ Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s Letters

On January 6, 1889, Nietzsche wrote to Jacob Burckhardt:

“When it comes right down to it I’d much rather have been a Basel professor than God; but I didn’t dare be selfish enough to forgo the creation of the world.”

~ Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s Letters

Two days earlier, Nietzsche penned the following letter to Cosima Wagner:

“It is a mere prejudice that I am a human being. Yet I have often enough dwelled among human beings and I know the things human beings experience, from the lowest to the highest. Among the Hindus I was Buddha, in Greece Dionysus – Alexander and Caesar were incarnations of me, as well as the poet of Shakespeare, Lord Bacon. Most recently I was Voltaire and Napoleon, perhaps also Richard Wagner…I also hung on the cross.”

~ Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s Letters

Within the span of these days he wrote the ominous line:

“What is unpleasant and jeopardizes my modesty is that, fundamentally, I am every name in history.”

~ Nietzsche, Nietzsche’s Letters

“Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

“And those who were seen dancing were thought to be insane by those who could not hear the music.”

~ Friedrich Nietzsche

List of names that are often associated with Nietzsche's writing, style, influence, or values:

Influenced by: Goethe, Schopenhauer, Stirner, Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Melville, Montaigne, Spinoza...

Influenced: Freud, Jung, Heidegger, Wittgenstein, Bataille, Deleuze, Derrida, Foucault, Jünger, Adorno, Brandes, Buber, Jaspers, Bergson, Sartre, Camus, Leo Strauss, Evola, Cioran, Unamuno, Shestov, Rand, Ortega y Gasset, Steiner, Tönnies, Weber, Spengler, Braudel, Veyne, Tillich, Altizer, Crowley, Neutzsky-Wulff, Kafka, Conrad, Mann, Hesse, Bukowski, Malraux, Kazantzakis, Gide, Hamsun, Strindberg, Joyce, Lawrence, Bartol, Baroja, Rilke, Yeats, Shaw, Artaud, O'Neill, Lovecraft, Stapledon, Braak, London, Mencken, Sloterdijk, Rorty, Kittler, Adler, Maslow...

Top Five Misconceptions of Nietzsche

1) People can become an Übermensch

Never yet has there been an overman. Naked I saw both the greatest and the smallest man: they are still all-too-similar to each other. Verily, even the greatest I found all-too-human. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra II 'On Priests')

God is a conjecture; but I desire that your conjectures should not reach beyond your creative will. Could you create a god? Then do not speak to me of any gods. But you could well create the overman. Perhaps not you yourselves, my brothers. But into fathers and forefathers of the overman you could re-create yourselves: and let this be your best creation. (Thus Spoke Zarathustra II 'Upon the Blessed Isles')

2) The Übermensch is an ideal individual

Whoever thought he had understood something of me, had made up something out of me after his own image — not uncommonly an antithesis to me; for example, an "idealist" — and whoever had understood nothing of me, denied that I need be considered at all.

The word "overman", as the designation of a type of supreme achievement, as opposed to "modem" men, to "good" men, to Christians and other nihilists — a word that in the mouth of a Zarathustra, the annihilator of morality, becomes a very pensive word — has been understood almost everywhere with the utmost innocence in the sense of those very values whose opposite Zarathustra was meant to represent — that is, as an "idealistic" type of a higher kind of man, half "saint", half "genius." (Ecce Homo 'Why I Write Such Good Books' §1)

3) Nietzsche endorsed psychopathic brutality

...between good and evil actions there is no difference in kind, but at the most one of degree. Good actions are sublimated evil ones; evil actions are coarsened, brutalized good ones. [...] Degrees of intelligent judgement decide whither each person will let his desire draw him; every society, every individual always has present an order of rank of things considered good, according to which he determines his own actions and judges those of others. But this standard is continually changing, many actions are called evil but are only stupid, because the degree of intelligence which decided for them was very low. (Human, All-Too Human I §107)

It goes without saying that I do not deny — unless I am a fool — that many actions called immoral ought to be avoided and resisted, or that many called moral ought to be done and encouraged — but I think the one should be encouraged and the other avoided for other reasons than hitherto. We have to learn to think differently — in order at last, perhaps very late on, to attain even more: to feel differently. (Daybreak §103)

4) Nietzsche was "for" or "against" nihilism

Nihilism as a psychological state will have to be reached, first, when we have sought a [1] "meaning" in all events that is not there: so the seeker eventually becomes discouraged. Nihilism, then, is the recognition of the long waste of strength, the agony of the "in vain", insecurity, the lack of any opportunity to recover and to regain composure — being ashamed in front of oneself, as if one had deceived oneself all too long. [...]

Nihilism as a psychological state is reached, secondly, when one has posited a [2] totality, a systematization, indeed any organization in all events, and underneath all events, and a soul that longs to admire and revere has wallowed in the idea of some supreme form of domination and administration [...] Some sort of unity, some form of "monism": this faith suffices to give man a deep feeling of standing in the context of, and being dependent on, some whole that is infinitely superior to him, and he sees himself as a mode of the deity. — "The well-being of the universal demands the devotion of the individual" — but behold, there is no such universal! At bottom, man has lost the faith in his own value when no in finitely valuable whole works through him; i.e., he conceived such a whole in order to be able to believe in his own value.

Nihilism as psychological state has yet a third and last form. Given these two insights, that becoming has no goal and that underneath all becoming there is no grand unity in which the individual could immerse himself completely as in an element of supreme value, an escape remains: to pass sentence on this whole world of becoming as a deception and to invent a world beyond it, a true world. But as soon as man finds out how that world is fabricated solely from psychological needs, and how he has absolutely no right to it, the last form of nihilism comes into being: it includes disbelief in any metaphysical world and forbids itself any belief in a [3] true world. Having reached this standpoint, one grants the reality of becoming as the only reality, forbids oneself every kind of clandestine access to afterworlds and false divinities — but cannot endure this world though one does not want to deny it.

What has happened, at bottom? The feeling of valuelessness was reached with the realization that the overall character of existence may not be interpreted by means of the concept of [1] "aim", the concept of [2] "unity", or the concept of [3] "truth". Existence has no goal or end; any comprehensive unity in the plurality of events is lacking: the character of existence is not "true", is false. One simply lacks any reason for convincing oneself that there is a true world. Briefly: the categories [1] "aim", [2] "unity", [3] "being" which we used to project some value into the world — we pull out again; so the world looks valueless. (The Will to Power §12)

Nihilism represents a pathological transitional stage (what is pathological is the tremendous generalization, the inference that there is no meaning at all): whether the productive forces are not yet strong enough, or whether decadence still hesitates and has not yet invented its remedies. [...] (The Will to Power §13)

Nihilism. It is ambiguous:

A. Nihilism as a sign of increased power of the spirit: as active nihilism.

B. Nihilism as decline and recession of the power of the spirit: as passive nihilism. (The Will to Power §22)

Nihilism as a normal condition.

It can be a sign of strength: the spirit may have grown so strong that previous goals ("convictions," articles of faith) have become incommensurate (for a faith generally expresses the constraint of conditions of existence, submission to the authority of circumstances under which one flourishes, grows, gains power).

Or a sign of the lack of strength to posit for oneself, productively, a goal, a why, a faith. (The Will to Power §23)

5) Nietzsche's immoralism is a licence for incivility

The good four.— Honest towards ourselves and whoever else is a friend to us; brave towards the enemy; magnanimous towards the defeated; polite — always: this is what the four cardinal virtues want us to be. (Daybreak §556)

Montaigne

Michel de Montaigne, who in 1571, fed up with his job as a magistrate in the city of Bordeaux, quit at the age of 38. Retreating to his library, he inscribed his reason on the wall of his study. “Weary of the servitude of the courts,” Mr. Montaigne declared, “I am determined to retire in order to spend what little remains of my life, now more than half run out … consecrated to my freedom, tranquillity, and leisure.”

He went on to invent an entirely new kind of writing — the essay — by which he launched an extraordinary experiment in self-examination. Yet he experimented lazily. “I have to solicit it nonchalantly,” he wrote about his memory. “What I do easily and naturally I can no longer do if I order myself to do it by strict and express command,” he wrote. For the man who transformed our way of reading and writing, he was seriously unserious. “If I encounter difficulties in reading, I do not gnaw my nails over them; I leave them there.” He added: “I do nothing without gaiety.”

Spinoza

· Spinoza believed that everything that exists is God

· Religion is outmode and based on ritual, tradition, fear and ignorance

· First pantheist?

Hume

· Humans are more influenced by our feelings than by reason/rationality

· Reason is the slave of passion

· Sympathy, encouragement, emotions and passions, animal instincts trump facts, logic and reasoning

· Religion is not fact based so rational argument over religion is the height of folly and arrogance

· The test of a belief isn’t its provable truth but its utility

Voltaire

· Deist – god created the world then stepped back

· Wanted religion (useful for morals and social cohesion) but not the church

· “If god had not existed it would have been necessary to invent him”

· “I disapprove of what you have to say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it.” misquote

Heraclitus

· A Greek philosopher of the late 6th century BCE, Heraclitus criticizes his predecessors and contemporaries for their failure to see the unity in experience.

· He claims to announce an everlasting Word (Logos) according to which all things are one, in some sense.

· Opposites are necessary for life, but they are unified in a system of balanced exchanges.

· The world itself consists of a law-like interchange of elements, symbolized by fire (energy).

· Thus the world is not to be identified with any particular substance, but rather with an ongoing process governed by a law of change.

· The underlying law of nature also manifests itself as a moral law for human beings.

· Heraclitus is the first Western philosopher to go beyond physical theory in search of metaphysical foundations and moral applications.

· Heraclitus stresses the inductive rather than the deductive method of grasping the world, a world that is rationally structured, if we can but discern its shape.

· Pre-Socrates Ionian

· The connectedness of the universe, everything is one and all is in a state of flux

· lux theory

· You never step in the same river twice

· Died in a pile of cow shot

Wittgenstein

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951 CE)

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

The limit of language results in the limit of the expression of thought, which limits our ability for thought altogether. The limit of thought limits our perception of reality, and therefore represents “the limits of my world”.

Wittgenstein had two periods of this thinking.

His early work is found in his Tractatus Logico Philosophicus, the only book published in his lifetime.

In this book, Wittgenstein presented the world with his truth table method of logic, which is still taught today in logic classes, thoroughly replacing Aristotle’s syllogisms. This early work was foundational for Logical Positivism and the Vienna Circle, dominating Analytic thought until the 1960s.

Tractatus Review:

"Philosophy is not a theory," asserted Austro-British philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), "but an activity." In this 1921 opus, his only philosophical work published during his lifetime, Wittgenstein defined the object of philosophy as the logical clarification of thoughts and proposed the solution to most philosophic problems by means of a critical method of linguistic analysis. In proclaiming philosophy as a matter of logic rather than of metaphysics, Wittgenstein created a sensation among intellectual circles that influenced the development of logical positivism and changed the direction of 20th-century thought.
Beginning with the principles of symbolism and the necessary relations between words and objects, the author applies his theories to various branches of traditional philosophy, illustrating how mistakes arise from inappropriate use of symbolism and misuses of language. After examining the logical structure of propositions and the nature of logical inference, he discusses the theory of knowledge as well as principles of physics and ethics and aspects of the mystical.
Supervised by the author himself, this translation from the German by C. K. Ogden is regarded as the definitive text. A magisterial introduction by the distinguished philosopher Bertrand Russell hails Wittgenstein's achievement as extraordinarily important, "one which no serious philosopher can afford to neglect." Introduction by Bertrand Russell

Wittgenstein spent the twenty years between returning to Cambridge in 1929 and his death in 1951 writing, revising and reordering notebooks that would become his Philosophical Investigations and other posthumous works, arranged and published by those he trusted most after his death.

He considered publishing his Investigations alongside his Tractatus to show his later thinking in contrast against the “grave mistakes” of his earlier work.

Wittgenstein says that the fundamental idea of his Tractatus is that the logical constants of connectives such as AND and OR are not representatives of particular things or practices, siding with Frege against Mill.

For early Wittgenstein, logic is not a practice of gathering and dividing things, but tracing out the structure of the single general propositional form.

Logic is prior to experience, the is of things being itself in its structure, and we do not experience it, rather experience different arrangements of it.

Hegel argued in his Logic that being itself does not have particular qualities or quantities, such that being isn’t always green or thirteen of anything, and so cannot be differentiated from anything else.

For early Wittgenstein, all questions that can be solved by logic can be completely solved by understanding the structure of logic, and everything else is quite undetermined and contingent in our experiences.

In an end of the century poll in the year 2000, philosophy professors from America and Canada were asked to list the five most important books that influenced their own work. When the results were tallied, the Philosophical Investigations was first, and the Tractatus was fourth. The Philosophical Investigations was cited far more frequently than any other book, was listed first on far more ballots, and crossed over more into many different disciplines and areas of study than any other book.

Wittgenstein argued that life is like a thread without a single strand running through the entire length, and so we should always beware of the lure of the secret cellar, the proud idea that we have hit bedrock and completely revealed the truth rather than revealed yet another strong connection between different interwoven things.

Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language

· Philosophical problems arise from misunderstandings of the logic of language

· The result of his thinking on logic was the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus which was eventually published in English in 1922 with Russell's help.

· This was the only book Wittgenstein published during his lifetime. Having thus, in his opinion, solved all the problems of philosophy

“The limits of my language mean the limits of my world.”

~ Ludwig Wittgenstein

· The categories we use to make sense of the world are part of us, and not part of the world. The boundaries that we draw around classes of objects – this is a chair, and that is not – are largely pragmatic, and not absolute.

· the only way to generate new concepts is to bootstrap them on top of existing concepts – that is, to use a metaphor

· Hayek argued in The Sensory Order, “An event of an entirely new kind which has never occurred before” – i.e. for which no metaphor could be constructed – “could not be perceived at all.”

· Recursion, the ability to take chunks of concepts and create a new concept with them – an ability that Chomskyans have identified as one of the fundamental mental operations underlying language and (therefore) human conceptual sophistication

· Versus Chomsky

o well, they're not entirely comparable, but

§ Wittgenstein was a philosopher interested in how our thoughts represent reality, and how our language reflects the way our thoughts represent reality. the idea is that there are things in the world-- like a tree in your front yard-- and we can use language to describe those facts, like the sentence "there is a tree in your front yard." he argued that, like, sentences like those correspond to mental 'pictures' in your head. he was mostly concerned with the relationship between facts, reality, and sentences. he studied the differences between the fact that there is a tree in your yard and the thought/sentence "there is a tree in your yard."

§ Chomsky instead focuses on the structure of sentences (in a very general sense). We know sentences have meanings, but some sentences are ambiguous. Why? Well, he posited that sentences have some sort of linguistic structure, and that humans are innately able to be aware of this structure and comprehend it. The universal grammar proposal is that all languages must share some underlying similarities based on the underlying facts about how a human brain works-- there are some kinds of sentences no language will have, there are some kinds of phrases most languages will have, etc. SO chomsky's theory doesn't really have much to say about the relationship between the tree in your yard and how you think about the tree. instead it focuses on how words get put together into sentences, regardless (most of the time) of what the sentences "mean."

Nietzsche below however pertains to Wittgenstein concepts:

-Nietzsche

Very confused and outdated view of Wittgenstein's thought. Actually if you read carefully his later writings, you can see a great deal of continuity with the Tractatus: first, he was always concerned with the same questions and problems both early and late (objectivity, rationality, logic, the connection between thought and world etc.), and secondly, he always saw himself as a logician investigating logical questions until the very end of his life, despite the superficial appearance of dealing with other topics like psychology or anthropology (so you might say that the Investigations is no less a book in logic than the Tractatus).

What has primarily changed between the Tractatus and the later philosophy is his method of investigation: initially he thought that you can say everything which is important and essential about thought and language apriori without looking closely at particular cases and the ways people practically deal with the world, whereas later he came to realize that things are not as simple and that logic is not something which exists in a vacuum and which can be given in advance, but rather is an integral part of human lives and actions.

This however is not to say (like according Rorty for example) that in the Tractatus he was some kind of traditional realist believing in correspondence theory of truth and things like that, and that later he simply scrapped everything he said before by rejecting what he said about logic, truth, the representation of reality by language etc.; rather, the view which he later rejected is a certain philosophical mythology or misunderstanding (which he thought infected the Tractatus as well) of what truth, rationality, objectivity, logical necessity etc. really consist in - not those very ideas themselves.

His famous discussions of rule-following is one such example. Pace Kripke, the point of his remarks about rule-following is not to deny the very objectivity of our linguistic practices, but to attack a certain philosophical picture of what those practices MUST look like to be considered truly answerable to objective reality. The lesson which Wittgenstein wants us to draw is not to deny that there's such a thing as 'language being answerable to an objective reality', but that the traditional conception of human rationality and agency (which was common both to reationalists and empiricists - or later on, realists and anti-realists) is hopelessly confused and the traditional philosophical problems about such matters (like Kripke's 'skeptical paradox') arise only because in philosophy we are not paying attention to what objectivity REALLY looks like in the context of our everyday lives. And this is what he meant by talking about 'use' - it was not indented as a kind of philosophical 'theory of meaning', but as an invitation to look more closely at the phenomena (such as language) that we are puzzled about when we do philosophy. Thus, his point is that phenomena like rule-following do not exist in a vacuum but rather manifest themselves in numerous ways in the most mundane things, such as teaching children at school, and the job of philosophy is to investigate this multiplicity and complexity in order to understand the logic of how things work (what he later called 'grammar') - which is a very different sort of investigation from what science for instance does, be it psychology or history.

If you want to call this an 'historicist' approach that's fine, but Wittgenstein's philosophy shouldn't be assimilated to some other continental traditions which may appear superficially similar because there are really enormous differences between them (one central difference is that there's something which many continental philosophers want to deny (like 'objective truth' or whatever) whereas for Wittgenstein there's nothing in philosophy which we are not permitted to say, as long as it makes sense, and what he is attacking are intellectual confusions and not denying the truth of what he took to be intelligible philosophical views.)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB3OwIV5oro

This is an introduction to the life, work, and legacy of the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein. There is little doubt that he was a towering figure of the twentieth century; on his return to Cambridge in 1929 Maynard Keynes wrote, “Well, God has arrived. I met him on the 5:15 train”. Wittgenstein is credited with being the greatest philosopher of the modern age, a thinker who left not one but two philosophies for his successors to argue over: The early Wittgenstein said, “the limits of my language mean the limits of my world”; the later Wittgenstein replied, “If God looked into our minds he would not have been able to see there whom we were speaking of”. Language was at the heart of both. Wittgenstein stated that his purpose was to finally free humanity from the pointless and neurotic philosophical questing that plagues us all. As he put it, “To show the fly the way out of the fly bottle”. He was something of a philosopher's philosopher. But how did he think language could solve all the problems of philosophy? How have his ideas influenced contemporary culture? And could his thought ever achieve the release for us that he hoped it would? Melvyn Bragg discusses Wittgenstein and these questions with Ray Monk (Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton), Barry Smith (Lecturer in Philosophy at Birkbeck, University of London), and Marie McGinn (Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of York).

Notes on Tractatus:

Why study this theory that is supposedly "wrong" and even wrong according to it's inventor?

First, the Tractatus agrees that it's wrong. To understand it is to see that it is wrong. But, throughout the book, he argues for the existence of the unspeakable and merely showable. Then he is able, without contradiction, to place his work in the category of mysticism along with works of art, ethics (which are all, ultimately, therapeutic?). And early and late Wittgenstein both agree that there is that which is unspeakable and must be shown. See Kripke's Wittgenstein: On Private Language, for more on this.

Also, it is beautiful philosophy. And, as in science, philosophical theories can have explanatory power and be illuminating models without being true. Similarly, a philosophical theory can be an advancement over past theories despite being false. And all philosophical theories are false or at least there truth is not assured. So, it's prudent to study a philosophy because it's fun rather than in the belief that you'll discover the truth.

The Tractatus is beautiful. As Russell notes in the Preface, it's a simplification. Although it contains some difficult arguments, it primarily solved or avoided philosophical problems by giving an alternative and plausible reinterpretation of fundamental concepts of logic and meaning.

The differences between Wittgenstein's early and late work are exaggerated. They share much in common and even illuminate each other.

Both affirm that propositions have meaning only through their application and given human constructed rules and assignments. Anscombe explains of the Tractatus, "The correlating is not something that the picture itself does it is something we do" by exhibiting relationships between the elements of the picture and therefore propositions. Roughly, the early work concerns fact stating language and logic whereas the later work concerns language and grammar. Both maintain the saying versus showing distinction. In the late work, rules (including those of logic, math, and grammar) must ultimately be shown and be in accordance with social interaction. Private language is not possible. [See Saul Kripke's Wittgenstein: On Private Language for an brilliant explanation of this and the private language argument.]

Also, both theories are intended to be primarily therapeutic. Wittgenstein explicitly says this at the end of the Tractatus. IF you understand it then you see that his sequence assertions can't make sense, but must belong to the domain of the mystical and ethics. You simply see that it must be true and, if you're concerned about the problems that concerned Wittgenstein, then you will be relieved. [[[As Wittgenstein says in his Notes on Logic, he was trying to discover something that would justify not thinking about philosophy by resolving it. [I need to reword this sentence and find the actual quote in his notes].]] This is very similar to Godel's incompleteness theorem which established, rigorously, the difference between truth and provability by explicitly constructed a sentence that is unprovable in a given axiomatic system, but can be seen to be true, in reality, by anyone who understands the proof. When the Tractatus was published, truth and provability concerning mathematics were thought to be equivalent. Truth was provability and demonstrability. Godel's proof breaks this down and suggests that Wittgenstein's saying versus showing distinction isn't as absurd as many of the positivists thought. Rebecca Goldstein argues this point in much more detail in Incompleteness; a book about Godel that has a lot to say about Godel's intellectual nemesis; Wittgenstein.

While many philosophers have suggested variants of such ideas in readings of the work of late Wittgenstein, namely the author of Philosophical Investigations, a notable aspect of the New Wittgenstein interpretation is a view that the work of early Wittgenstein, exemplified by the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, and the Investigations, are actually more deeply connected, and in less opposition, to each other than usually understood. This view is in direct conflict with the long-standing, if somewhat old-fashioned, interpretation of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus advocated by the logical positivists associated with the Vienna Circle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_Wittgenstein

I feel like, compared to other philosophers, who present their ideas in a ‘conventionally’ cogent, coherent, premise-premise-conclusion manner, sure, he may seem unnecessarily unclear, gratuitously enigmatic, and self-indulgently esoteric (& thus be a bad writer).

However, I think his project didn’t consist in presenting his ‘theories’ or his thoughts, for such thoughts to be discussed/entertained/critiqued. Instead, I would say that his project consisted in actively involving the reader and getting the reader to ‘do the work’ themselves, as it were {I’m speaking here primarily of ‘Philosophical Investigations‘ and Wittgenstein’s later philosophy}. His intention wasn’t to offer speculative theories, but to try and get the reader to ‘see things’ from a fresh perspective, one that, so he wished, would show the reader that the problems they were preoccupied with, were not actually problems at all, but were resultants of conceptual confusions.

So, I think that comparing his writing to the writing of, say, Descartes, Kant, Kripke etc., sure: he’s a bad writer. But if you try and see WHAT he’s actually trying to do, you see that his writing just forms part of his attempt to show the reader that philosophy is, indeed, “a struggle against the bewitchment of our intelligence by means of language“.

The motivations for the claim that language is innate are, for many, quite straightforward. The innateness of language is seen as the only way to solve the so-called logical problem of language acquisition : the mismatch between linguistic input and linguistic output. In this paper, I begin by unravelling several strands of the nativist argument, offering replies as I go along. I then give an outline of Wittgenstein’s view of language acquisition , showing how it renders otiose problems posed by nativists like Chomsky —not least by means of Wittgenstein’s own brand of grammar which, unlike Chomsky’s, does not reside in the brain, but in our practices .

Chomsky

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Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) was a German idealist philosopher and one of the central Enlightenment thinkers. Kant's comprehensive and systematic works in epistemology, metaphysics, ethics, and aesthetics have made him one of the most influential figures in modern Western philosophy. No philosopher since Plato or Aristotle has had a bigger impact on subsequent philosophers.

There are many ways to answer this question. One reason is that part of what makes the great philosophers after Kant great are the different insights and problems they found in Kant, and what they did about them. “What makes Kant important?” is a philosophical question not just a factual and historical one.

But I’ll hazard a general comment anyway.

Kant’s importance is to have transformed the enterprise of philosophy itself, turning what had been ontological questions into epistemological ones. What had been questions about the world became questions about the mind. What had been seen as features of objective reality – space, time, and causality, for example – were now seen as mental items that structured all possible experience. Metaphysics – the attempt to give an account of the ultimate nature of reality as it is in itself, independently of how it appears to us – became the analysis of the necessary conditions of intelligibility.

Kant compared his accomplishment to the Copernican revolution. Copernicus was able to explain the motions of the heavenly bodies by replacing the assumption that the Earth was at rest with the assumption that it was moving around the Sun. Analogously, Kant was able to explain our knowledge of the objective world by replacing the assumption that experience is shaped by reality with the assumption that reality is shaped by experience. In both cases there was a revolution in point of view.

Kant sharpened and deepened a set of questions having to do with what it is possible to know, how we can know that we know something, and just what it is we know when we do know something. In doing so he ruled out the possibility of acquiring knowledge of some things that human beings have cared about very much, such as the existence and nature of God and the soul. He suggested that the scope of our knowledge is intimately connected to its limits, and that without these limits there could be no knowledge at all.

Knowledge, Kant said, is limited to possible objects of experience, and experience in turn is shaped by our cognitive faculties and abilities. If we think through what these observations imply, it turns out that it makes no sense to say that we can have knowledge of reality as it is independently of our minds.

The world consists of things in space and time that change in orderly, causally determined ways. These things are immediately and undeniably present, and features such as their volume and weight and ability to affect and be affected by one another clearly pertain to them. But taking up space and changing while persisting over time are also conditions of the intelligibility of experience, and they pertain to us. The things and events we encounter are “out there” doing what they do; but at the same time it’s impossible to understand them except as mind-dependent objects of experience.

Kant reasoned that in order to have an intelligible experience there are certain concepts, such as the aforementioned space, time, and causality, that we can’t do without. Without them, it would be impossible for us to apprehend objects. But where do these concepts and forms come from? Not from observing things in the world and inferring from or generalizing about them, for being able to observe things at all requires that we already have the concepts and forms in our possession.

For example, the concept of causality indicates that two events are necessarily connected. But as David Hume pointed out, we don’t observe anything like “necessity” in the world; what we see is that one kind of event is regularly correlated with another kind of event. Events can be correlated, however, without there being a causal relationship between them: day is invariably followed by night, but night is not caused by day. In order for us to perceive that one event is caused by another – that a billiard ball at rest is caused to move when hit by the cue ball, for example – we must possess the concept of a necessary connection. And since we could not have acquired this concept by means of experience – it being a condition of experience – its source must be in us.

This applies to every feature of objective reality that we can cognize. Consider what is involved in perceiving a rose, perhaps in a vase on a table in the living room. We see it to be a certain distance from us and from other objects on the table and in the room. We perceive its shape, color, scent, and, if we pick it up, its texture and weight. We can observe it systematically and identify its parts and their functions, apprehending in that way that it is the reproductive organ of a plant. With further study we can understand its chemical and atomic constituents.

Some of what’s involved in perceiving the features I listed is dependent on the senses and some of it is dependent on the mind. If we ask what idea we can form of a rose that makes no reference to either – the rose as it is independently of how it appears to us – the answer is that we just cannot do so. It may be irresistible to assume that there is some sort of independently existing object that causes us to perceive the rose as we do, but stating what such an entity would be like without appealing to some kind of experience that we could have is simply not possible. The features that define a rose, so far as we’re concerned, are all mind-dependent – as is everything else we can know.

Kant also clarified what it means and what it does not mean to say that objects of knowledge are mind-dependent – that we can only acquire knowledge of things as they appear to us. To say that something is an “appearance,” for Kant, is not to say that it is unreal. Kant is not an idealist in the sense that he holds that what we take to be physical objects are in reality non-physical ideas. Appearances are as real as we experience them to be.

This observation suggests another way of putting Kant’s achievement. Traditionally, metaphysicians had debated whether the ultimate nature of reality was physical or mental. Efforts to reduce either to the other were conspicuously unsuccessful, and the debate seemed unresolvable. Kant solved the problem by locating both the physical and the mental in experience. Instead of determining the ultimate nature of reality, the task of philosophy is to analyze, understand, and determine the limits of the perceptual and cognitive abilities that structure the experience of objects, whether physical or mental.

Kant’s Copernican revolution in philosophy had an impact on virtually every great philosopher down to the present day. Because of Kant, intelligibility became the central topic and problem of philosophy. Thinkers as different from one another as Hegel, Wittgenstein, and Davidson, and even critics of the philosophical tradition such as Nietzsche and Heidegger, are inconceivable without Kant insofar as they believe that understanding how we make sense of the world is the key to understanding the world and our place in it.

In his doctrine of transcendental idealism, Kant argued that space and time are mere "forms of intuition" which structure all experience, and therefore that while “things-in-themselves” exist and contribute to experience, they are nonetheless distinct from the objects of experience. From this it follows that the objects of experience are mere “appearances”, and that the nature of things as they are in themselves is consequently unknowable to us.

In an attempt to counter the skepticism that he found in the writings of the British/Scottish philosopher David Hume, he wrote the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/1787), one of his most well-known works. In it, he developed his theory of experience to answer the question of whether synthetic a priori (i.e. “before the fact”) knowledge is possible, which would in turn make it possible to determine the limits of metaphysical inquiry. Kant drew a parallel to the Copernican revolution in his proposal that the objects of the senses must conform to our spatial and temporal forms of intuition, and that we can consequently have a priori cognition of the objects of the senses.

Immanuel Kant was one of the most influential philosophers in European history, and part of the reason for his fame was that he tried to synthesize empiricism and rationalism into a single, combined philosophy.

Kant argued that all of our knowledge comes from observations and experience, so in that sense he was an empiricist.

But he also argued that those observations and experiences were constrained by the inherent structures of thought itself. In other words, the human mind is wired to make only certain kinds of observations — so, observation has limits.

And those limits, Kant argued, are what we call logic and rationality. So in that sense he was a rationalist!

Space and time are a-priori intentions of the human mind and provide the medium for our experience of objects (they are not derived by experience but are what we need in order to experience).

o The objects we see have to conform to a purely human facility of perception. If a person is to know an object, the object has to appear in space and time. But these are conditions only of human knowledge, of necessarily of the knowledge of other rational beings.

For Kant space and time are pure forms of intuition.

Space is the form of outer sense, time the form of inner sense.

Kant would agree with Hume that that knowledge as empirical knowledge begins with experience, but he would deny that all knowledge arises from experience.

Kant agrees with Hume that we cannot have knowledge of ultimate reality. All the objects that we experience are phenomena or appearances of things which underlie them.

These things which are not in space or time, consequently, cannot be known by us.

Concepts like “God” or the “Tao”, objects which go beyond the limits of any possible sense experience, human beings can never experience. We can think these concepts as long as we do not think that we have knowledge of their objects.

“Although all our knowledge begins with experience, it does not follow that it arises from experience.” (Immanuel Kant)

Let's give some context in which Kant was writing. Traditionally in Western thought, the question "How do we know things?" has been given two answers. According to the rationalist school of thought (which can be broadly understood as following in the tradition of Plato), truth is ascertained by human reason: statements which are known rationally are definitely true (2+2=4, "the self exists", etc. are all intuitively true by reason, so they're true statements). However, our observations are not necessarily true, because they are not known rationally - when I observe a table, am I really observing a table itself? Or am I merely observing the image of a table, which indirectly represents the table itself? Or is there no real table at all, and I my visions are purely illusory?

Alternatively, the empiricists believe that only that knowledge which is acquired by means of empirics (observation) is verifiable true, because reality exists independent of the mind, and the mind is merely a forum in which that reality may presence itself. So the only things that are true are those which are objective and independent of the mind.

Kant wrote the Critique of Pure Reason in response to a philosopher of the second group, David Hume. Hume was an empiricist who, amongst other things, claimed that empiricist philosophy invalidated a lot of intuitively obvious beliefs - notably things like causality (causation - the causal relation between two events - isn't observed. Only the events and objects themselves are observed, so causality is metaphysically unknowable - something that we just impute onto reality, but is not actually observed in that reality). So Kant's Critique was an attempt to resuscitate reason as a way of accurately ascertaining truth.

TLDR summary comes now - Transcendental idealism is Kant's answer to the empiricist-rationalist divide. It basically states that truth is the synthetic product of the structure of human logic. Things are only "true" insofar as they are known by the mind. What the mind intuits is necessarily true, because the only standard for truth is our actual knowledge of things. It doesn't make any sense to say that something of which we do not or cannot know is "true", because truth is the product of a subjective cognition (subjective does not mean "arbitrary" here, only contingent upon the subject's understanding). So the question of whether or not a table "exists" or if it is merely an indirect impression of some other, "more real" table (or, rather, that there is no table at all) doesn't make any sense, because the standards of "existence", "reality" and "being" cannot be divorced from the understanding of the subjective mind.

Truth is the product of synthetic relations ordered by the structure of the human mind. We know certain things a priori and analytically (tautologies, "A=A", or even "2+2=4", in which the information is purely reflective, but nonetheless true by conformity to human logic), and these statements are "true", because the only standard of "truth" is conformity with this logic of the mind. However, our intuitions ("I am relating to a table on a material level in front of me - I see it, feel it, etc.") are also trustworthy: only, their truth content consists of the subjective knowledge of these things, not in their existence independent of our subjective experience of them. That is how the "the object conforms to the nature of our faculty of intuition" - the objects of our senses (tables, apples, etc.) exist in conformity to our "faculty of intuition" (the manner in which they perceive them), not because they exist in themselves in some external reality.

I have some weird advice for understanding Kant: read (early) Wittgenstein, but try to think of him as a Kantian philosopher. When Wittgenstein says that the "world exists as propositions" or something along those lines, what he means is that the truth-content or reality of things (which are the same thing for idealists) "exist" as understood by our unique human logic. We possess a certain way of understanding things (our intuitions, reason, etc.), and it doesn't make any sense to establish a standard of truth "beyond" this understanding, because, in the words of Wittgenstein, "Whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent." What cannot be understood by human intuition and reason cannot be said to exist or be true in the proper sense of the word, and what is understood by these means of knowing is definitively true, because truth is linked entirely with our human understanding.

Husserl

German philosopher and principal founder of phenomenology—and thus one of the most influential philosophers of the 20th century.

In his early work, he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic based on analyses of intentionality.

In his mature work, he sought to develop a systematic foundational science based on the so-called phenomenological reduction.

He has made important contributions to almost all areas of philosophy and anticipated central ideas of its neighboring disciplines such as linguistics, sociology and cognitive psychology.

Intellectual insight has precedence over procedural techniques of the Fregen kind thus aligning with Aristotle and the archaic tradition.

Although both critiqued psychologism, Husserl still searched for intentionality which itself can be construed as a form of psychologism .

Phenomenology was a legitimate alternative to analytic

As a movement and a method, as a "first philosophy," phenomenology owes its life to Edmund Husserl (1859–1938), a German-Czech (Moravian) philosopher who started out as a mathematician in the late nineteenth century and wrote a book on the philosophy of mathematics, Philosophie der Arithmetik (1891; The Philosophy of Arithmetic).

His view was that there was a strict empiricism, but on being shown (by the great German logician Gottlob Frege) that such an analysis could not possibly succeed, Husserl shifted his ground and started to defend the idea that the truths of arithmetic had a kind of necessity that could not be accounted for by empiricism.

Thus, one of the main themes of his next book, Logische Untersuchungen (1913, 1921; The Logical Investigations), was a protracted argument against "psychologism," the thesis that truth is dependent on the human mind. Rather, Husserl argues that necessary truths are not reducible to our psychology.

Phenomenology was Husserl's continuing and continuously revised effort to develop a method for grounding necessary truth.

His primary goal is to find objective truth. What is objective truth? Maybe science hasn't found objective truth because the processes they're using to find it are incorrect so he wants to study the process of determining what truth is objective truth not subjective.

Husserl tries to break things down to the essence a no idea which greatly influenced Heidegger i.e. example of wax

Friedrich Nietzsche, in particular, had argued that all knowledge is perspectival and that philosophy could not be reduced to a single perspective, that philosophy might be relative to a people, or to our particular species, or even to individual psychology.

Husserl's contemporary Wilhelm Dilthey defended a milder but similar thesis, and the "sociology of knowledge" was just beginning its ascension.

Against any such relativism, Husserl insisted on philosophy as a singular, rigorous science, and his phenomenology was to provide the key.

It is often debated whether phenomenology is a philosophy or a method, but it is both.

As a "first philosophy," without presuppositions, it lays the basis for all further philosophical and scientific investigations.

Husserl defines phenomenology as the scientific study of the essential structures of consciousness.

By describing those structures, Husserl promises us, we can find certainty, which philosophy has always sought.

To do that, Husserl describes a method—or rather, a series of continuously revised methods—for taking up a peculiarly phenomenological standpoint, "bracketing out" everything that is not essential, thereby understanding the basic rules or constitutive processes through which consciousness does its work of knowing the world.

The central doctrine of Husserl's phenomenology is the thesis that consciousness is intentional, a doctrine that is borrowed from Franz Brentano. That is, every act of consciousness is directed at some object or other, perhaps a material object, perhaps an "ideal" object—as in mathematics.

Thus, the phenomenologist can distinguish and describe the nature of the intentional acts of consciousness and the intentional objects of consciousness, which are defined through the content of consciousness.

It is important to note that one can describe the content of consciousness and, accordingly, the object of consciousness without any particular commitment to the actuality or existence of that object. Thus, one can describe the content of a dream in much the same terms that one describes the view from a window or a scene from a novel.

In Ideas: A General Introduction to Pure Phenomenology (1931), Husserl distinguishes between the natural standpoint and the phenomenological standpoint.

The former is our ordinary everyday viewpoint and the ordinary stance of the natural sciences, describing things and states-of-affairs.

The latter is the special viewpoint achieved by the phenomenologist as he or she focuses not on things but on our consciousness of things. (This is sometimes confused by the fact that Husserl insists that the phenomenologist pay attention to "the things themselves," by which he means the phenomena, or our conscious ideas of things, not natural objects.)

One arrives at the phenomenological standpoint by way of a series of phenomenological "reductions," which eliminate certain aspects of our experience from consideration.

Husserl formulates several of these, and their nature shifts throughout his career, but two of them deserve special mention.

The first and best-known is the epoché or "suspension" that he describes in Ideas, in which the phenomenologist "brackets" all questions of truth or reality and simply describes the contents of consciousness. (The word is borrowed from both the early Skeptics and René Descartes.)

The second reduction (or set of reductions) eliminates the merely empirical content of consciousness and focuses instead on the essential features, the meanings of consciousness.

Thus Husserl (like Kant) defends a notion of "intuition" that differs from and is more specialized than the ordinary notion of "experience."

We have intuitions that are eidetic, meaning that we recognize meanings and necessary truths in them, and not merely the contingent things of the natural world.

In his early work, including Ideas, Husserl defends a strong realist position—that is, the things that are perceived by consciousness are assumed to be not only objects of consciousness but also the things themselves.

A decade or so later, Husserl made a shift in his emphasis from the intentionality of the objects to the nature of consciousness as such.

His phenomenology became increasingly and self-consciously Cartesian, as his philosophy moved to the study of the ego and its essential structures.

In 1931 Husserl was invited to lecture at the Sorbonne in Paris, and on the basis of those lectures published his Cartesianische Meditationen (1938; Cartesian Meditations, 1960). (The Paris Lectures were also published some years later.)

He argues there that "the monadically concrete ego includes the whole of actual and potential conscious life" and "the phenomenology of this self-constitution coincides with phenomenology as a whole (including objects)" (Cartesian Meditations, 68, para. 33). These statements suggest the strong idealist tendency in his later philosophy.

As in the 1930s, Husserl again reinvented phenomenology, this time with a shift toward the practical, or what some might call the more "existential" dimension of human knowledge.

Warning of a "crisis" in European civilization based on rampant relativism and irrationalism (an alarm that the logical positivists were raising about the same time in Vienna), Husserl published his Krisis der Europäischen Wissenschaften (1937; Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology).

In Crisis, the focus turned to the "lifeworld" and the nature of social existence, topics that played little role in his earlier investigations of the philosophy of arithmetic and the nature of individual consciousness but would come to play a much greater role in the "existential" phenomenology that would follow.

But it is much to Husserl's credit that he continued to see the inadequacies of his own method and correct them, in ever-new efforts to get phenomenology right.

Frege

· German philosopher, logician, and mathematician.

· He worked as a mathematics professor at the University of Jena (a poor University one of the reasons for his lack of recognition), and is understood by many to be the father of analytic philosophy, concentrating on the philosophy of language, logic, and mathematics.

· Though largely ignored during his lifetime, Giuseppe Peano and Bertrand Russell introduced his work to later generations of philosophers.

· His lifelong project, of showing that mathematics was reducible to logic, was not successful.

Logical analysis functions without need of a subject to sort sets. Logic precedes and stands alone from intellect. Objects that fit in a set, are objects that fit in a set without the requirement for to be subjectively sorted out by an embodied subject just looking at the different objects, there is something of a logical algorithm to provide each set.

Logical analysis is independent of the thinking subject

Subjective differences cannot explain objective meanings

Repeatability and variability of meanings shows that they can’t be reduced to mere

A fact is simply a true thought

All problems can be solved through logical analysis

Vienna Circle

W.V.O. Quine

Famous analytical philosopher

Willard Van Orman Quine was an American philosopher and logician in the analytic tradition, recognized as "one of the most influential philosophers of the twentieth century."

From 1930 until his death 70 years later, Quine was continually affiliated with Harvard University in one way or another, first as a student, then as a professor of philosophy and a teacher of logic and set theory, and finally as a professor emeritus who published or revised several books in retirement

From class notes:

There is no difference between philosophy and science and they should use the same methods

Widely popular in the 50’s but later discounted

Heidegger

But along comes Heidegger, student of Edmund Husserl, who begins his career a card-carrying phenomenologist. It’s right here that he sees phenomenology eventually running into a lot of very serious problems.

Started off as a verified phenomenologist but then he began to find problems with some of the basic concepts

The big maxim here that I like to underscore, the question central to phenomenology that’s going to help us understand why Heidegger did what he did, is the question: Is it possible that we’re so familiar with this daily process of just perceiving the world that that familiarity is clouding our ability to see the world clearly?

Heidegger thinks there’s an even bigger mistake Husserl’s making, and that, even though he’s an undeniable brilliant thinker, and recognized a mistake that so many philosophers have made in the past–Even though he recognized the fact that we shouldn’t be caring so much about the objects of the world before we have a true understanding of the lens that we view those objects through–Heidegger thought there was something massive Husserl himself was overlooking. Husserl may have understood what underlies the objects of our experience, but what underlies the ability to be able to study the structures of human thought at all? Existence.

What does it mean to exist?

What does it mean to be a human being?

These ontological question we were talking about.

Heidegger’s explorations reveal that there are no universal structures of consciousness. It is always contextual. Thus the way you interpret a particular situation is going to be different than that of a Somali peasant or an Ancient Babylonian nobleman.

Heidegger shifts the focus of the Husserlian school of thought from an epistemological investigation into knowledge to an ontological investigation into being. This is where Heidegger’s concept of Dasein enters the scene as the idea of being in the world.

So with Heidegger we find the proper break from the scientific modernist worldview. For him, philosophy is more fundamental than science. Science is merely one worldview that has arisen from a very specific cultural context. It is not the golden yardstick by which everything should be measured but merely another among many ways of viewing the world.

Heidegger realized the answers to these questions drastically inform these other two areas that philosophers engage in. Like just imagine for a second, if every philosopher we’ve ever talked about on this show wrote their work from the ontological perspective of Plato and his buddies that we talked about at the beginning of the episode. Like, what would Kant’s work look like, if he just blindly asusmed from the beginning that a human being is just a bipedal animal with no feathers? What if there was no Diogenes to embarrass everyone and keep the conversation going with a plucked chicken?

No question about it, things would look very different.

First of all, what exactly is it that you’re trying to do, phenomenology? You’re trying to get an exhaustive understanding of the structures of human thought? You’re gonna arrive at the structures of human thought? Heidegger thought, isn’t that kind of an extension of a mistake philosophers have been making all throughout history? Like David Hume. When David Hume writes An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, who really is to say that if David Hume lived for another few years, and could publish another book, this one called An Enquiry Concerning Squirrel Understanding, or Raccoon Understanding, who’s to say that it wouldn’t have been the exact same book? In other words, how can we know for sure that the underlying structure of human thought is not the underlying structure of mammalian thought? Or all conscious thought, for that matter?

And it goes the other way too! What are we using to be able to arrive at these conclusions about the architecture of human thought? Oh yeah, our subjective experience of the world. Let’s say we arrived at a conclusion. How can we ever say that we’re positive that this is the way every human being that’s ever gonna live structures their thought? Or even every human being that’s alive today for that matter? I mean, is it that inconceivable to think that maybe something like your level of intellect effects the structure of your thought? Or, even the culture that you were born into, or the values that you possess? Is it crazy to think that those might have a drastic effect?

Now, when Heidegger takes a look at the history of ontology in the western canon of philosophy, of course there’s variation among the philosophers, but he notices something. On one issue in particular, there seems to be this mutual consensus among practically every philosopher that’s ever lived, and man does a consensus like that start to look rather suspicious to Heidegger.

Kierkegaard

“Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom”

Well-known existentialist much like Sartre

Bergson

Henri-Louis Bergson was a French-Jewish philosopher who was influential in the tradition of continental philosophy, especially during the first half of the 20th century until the Second World War. Bergson is known for his arguments that processes of immediate experience and intuition are more significant than abstract rationalism and science for understanding reality

An Introduction to Metaphysics (Introduction a la Metaphysique) is a 1903 essay by Henri Bergson that explores the concept of reality.

For Bergson, reality occurs not in a series of discrete states but as a process similar to that described by the Greek philosopher Heraclitus.

Reality is fluid and cannot be completely understood through reductionistic analysis, which he said, "implies that we go around an object", gaining knowledge from various perspectives which are relative. Instead, reality can be grasped absolutely only through intuition, which Bergson expressed as "entering into" the object.

TL;DR: Brief overview of Henri Bergson’s model of memory and perception.

“… consciousness means memory. … there are no two identical moments in the life of the same conscious being. Take the simplest sensation, suppose it constant, absorb in it the entire personality: the consciousness which will accompany this sensation cannot remain identical with itself for two consecutive moments, because the second moment always contains, over and above the first, the memory that the first has bequeathed to it. A consciousness which could experience two identical moments would be a consciousness without memory. It would die and be born again continually. In what other way could one represent unconsciousness?” - Bergson, H., An Introduction to Metaphysics, p. 5-6

“In fact, there is no perception which is not full of memories. With the immediate and present data of our senses we mingle a thousand details out of our past experiences. In most cases these memories supplant our actual perceptions, of which we retain only a few hints, thus using them merely as ‘signs’ that recall to us former images. The convenience and the rapidity of perception are brought at this price; but hence also springs every kind of illusion. … However brief we suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a certain duration, and involves consequently an effort of memory which prolongs one into another a plurality of moments.” - Bergson, H., Matter and Memory, p. 23

Henri Bergson was a French polymath whose life spanned the late 19th and early 20th centuries. There has been an impressive failure to understand Bergson, despite him being one of the most important and influential intellectuals of his era.

Bergson is known for anticipating quantum mechanics thirty years before its formal discovery, partially by recognising that time is asymmetric, and is perhaps most famous for his extended debate with Albert Einstein on the nature of time.

Bergson was formally trained as a mathematician. He brought an extensive ongoing knowledge of contemporary physics and psychology to develop his philosophical schema.

Bergson’s unorthodox theories of perception and memory still stand as some of the most comprehensive and potentially accurate accounts of the phenomena and are being validated in contemporary neuroscientific research.

For Bergson, without a theory of perception, i.e, experience, any theory of memory is utterly ungrounded. He argued that we cannot have a theory of storage of experience if we do not know what experience is.

Bergson’s solution was to provide a novel direct perception model of experience, though the implications of his theory would require an entirely new model of memory. Memory, according to Bergson, is not simply a weaker form of perception, as Kant, Locke, and others saw it. Rather, perception is itself wholly contingent on the culmination of memory.

His theory of perception implies an entirely different model of memory, far from the “storage-in-the-brain” widget model that the computer or neural network models presume. Thought, or cognition, also employs elements of our past experience, hence the nature of thought too must be entirely different than that envisioned by the computer model of mind.

Our perceptions of objects in the universe are not generated by the brain, Bergson claims; rather they exist external to us, “out there” in space as a “diminution” of the totality of images.

”The image, then, is formed and perceived in the object, not the brain.” - Bergson, H., Matter and Memory, p. 27

Perception, Bergson suggests, is “virtual action”, infused with a synthesis of the past, memory. This means that in perception, according to Bergson, we are seeing how we can act, virtual potential movements that could be actualised by physical actions.

Bergson’s proposition that our perceived images of the external world exist precisely where they appear to be, in the external world, is a form of direct realism.

“The brain is part of the material world; the material world is not part of the brain.” - Bergson, H., Matter and Memory, p. 16-7

The popular hypothesis that experiences are generated, represented, perceived and stored “in the brain” is just that, a hypothesis, formally known as indirect realism. Although indirect realism and the physical storage of memory in the brain has never been scientifically validated, it is often pronounced with the force of dogma.

Despite extreme theoretical weaknesses and a lack of supportive evidence, the notion that the brain, and therefore a machine, can store experience is a lynchpin both in theories of consciousness and in the computational model of mind with its view that machines can be conscious. If the brain cannot and does not store experience, then neither will a robot, a computer, or a neural network.

Bergson’s view of how the brain works is, for this reason, counter to the computational model of mind. Bergson would urge that the brain, which he called the “organ of attention to life”, does not compute information, rather it receives, delays, inhibits, and returns movement. He argued that the brain is not a reservoir of experiences, it is not a database where memories are stored. Memories, according to Bergson’s notion of time, which he calls “duration”, are in the past which itself still exists in a very concrete sense.

“However brief we suppose any perception to be, it always occupies a certain duration, and involves consequently an effort of memory which prolongs one into another a plurality of moments.” - Bergson, H., Matter and Memory, p. 23

We tend to think that the brain must store our experience precisely because we believe that reality has no extent backwards into the past. Time is typically conceived of as a series of instants. Each present instant is thought to fall away into non-existence in the past as the next instant arrives. Hence the past is, by definition, non-existent. This conceptual notion of time Bergson refuted at length in favour of an intuitive, indivisible, experienced sense of duration. He argued that in experience “consciousness streams forever forward without stuttering between time units”.

In Bergson’s schema the structure of reality is laid out exactly as it occurred, in order, chronologically, along the 4D extent of being.

The brain, as a portion of the 4D extent of being, is like a valve. The valve holds back the 4D mass of past experience and is changed according to the array of activated action systems in the body and brain. In accordance with the configuration of this array, various experiences are let through the valve into consciousness.

Depending on the state of configurations in the brain, different experiences are allowed into consciousness; this is called “redintegration”, a term coined by Christian Wolff which denotes the phenomenon where a previous event is recalled by reinstatement of part of the original event.

The vastness of our past experiences, then, are always there, they are concrete and exist in duration, yet are held back by the brain; the brain, accordingly, is really the limiter of our awareness of the 4D extent of our past experience.

Aquinas

Thomas Aquinas, of course, brought together the philosophy of Aristotle with the revelation of Christianity, which meant modifying the proud moral virtue displayed by both the Greek Aristotle and the Roman Cicero with the humility of the Christian.

Hermes Trismegistus

In parallel with official exoteric religions, there have always been esoteric organisations dedicated to the perpetuation of their spiritual heritage throughout the ages.

The Egyptian mystery schools, where one could study the mysteries of the universe, nature and themselves, gave rise to a gnōsis, a secret knowledge that was perpetuated throughout the centuries; from Egypt to ancient Greece, passing through the Pythagoreans, and then to ancient Rome via the Neoplatonists.

The Greek word ‘gnōsis’ means ‘knowledge’, although not of the sort that can be taught. Gnosis was understood as an existential knowledge of who we are, where we came from, where we’re going; a higher knowledge of both consciousness and reality; a spiritual illumination, or direct knowledge of God.

Along with this mystical gnosis came the Hermetic writings on various technical, philosophical and occult topics from medicine and pharmacology, alchemy and magic, to astrology, cosmology, theology and anthropology.

Hermes Trismegistus is a semi-mythical Hellenistic figure, a sage who supposedly lived during an unknown age in ancient Egypt. To Jewish mystics, Hermes was known as Enoch; to the Muslims as Irdis; to the Egyptians as Thoth. He is the quintessential teacher of Western esoteric wisdom, and the purported author of the collection of Hermetic treatises; now collectively named the Hermetica.

Although very little is known about Hermes, it is clear from the works attributed to him that he functioned as the intermediary Supreme Being. In myth, Hermes was the scribe and herald of the Gods. He was the God of crossing boundaries, thus he was responsible for delivering their messages to the humans and for guiding human souls to the Underworld.

Hermes was said to have written thousands of books on what would later be called Hermeticism and alchemy, a.k.a the Hermetic art. Unfortunately very little of these writings survived the destruction of libraries and burning of books by the Romans and Christian zeal.

Eventually, the Roman Empire collapsed and Europe fell into the Dark Ages, during which time the Greek Neoplatonic tradition, Kabbalah, the Jewish tradition, Sufism, the Islamic tradition, the Hermetic tradition inherited from Egypt, and various strains of astrology from the Persians, were all mixed together.

The European alchemists of the Middle Ages inherited this tradition and finally transmitted it to the Rosicrucians of the 17th century. It was then perpetuated throughout the following centuries and gave birth to many Rosicrucian persuasions who sought the restoration of the whole world through the renovation of the arts and sciences.

The Rosicrucians brought the European Renaissance to a climax by creating the Renaissance in England and laying the foundations for modern science and society.

The texts Hermetic themselves don’t date back to ancient Egypt, as many people during the Renaissance believed. However, the teachings within the texts do share a notable affinity with ancient Egyptian wisdom literature as well as containing many literary parallels with older Egyptian prophecies and hymns to the Gods.

Whoever they were, the anonymous authors of the texts used Hermes' name as a pseudonym, attributing their knowledge and wisdom to him.

To them Hermes Trismegistus was a philosopher and priest, as well as a sage, scientist and sorcerer, considered to be the founder of mathematics, geometry, philosophy, alchemy, medicine and magic. He was believed to have invented writing and was the patron of all arts that are dependent upon it.

At the core of Hermes’s teachings is a simple idea - God (Atum) is a Big Mind within which everything exists.

‘Atum is Mind.

This is how he contains the Cosmos.

All things are thoughts which the Creator thinks.’

Hermes teaches that the mind of a human being is made in the image of God’s Mind.

‘That which is above is like to that which is below, and that which is below is like to that which is above.’

In Hermes’ conception, God’s is not a little mind like ours which is dimly conscious of itself and is limited to a physical body. Rather it is free of limitations, free to be conscious of everything, at all times and in all places. The cosmos is created from, maintained by, and exists within this Big Mind.

For Hermes, everything that exists is an idea within the Mind of God. He creates all things, as our minds create thoughts and ideas. Just as the nature of the little mind is to constantly think, so the nature of the Big Mind is to continuously create.

Hermes describes this Big Mind as the Oneness which unites everything, in a similar way to how our minds unite the individual sensations of the body into a unified experience. Everything that has or will ever exist is united in the Mind of God.

Paradoxically, this Oneness contains all opposites. In the same way that our minds can experience joy or sadness, brightness or darkness, warmth or coldness. We can’t experience opposites at the same time, yet they are all contained within our minds and are therefore united by it.

To conceive of this Mind is difficult, to define it is impossible. It is whole and constant, incorruptible and everlasting. Hidden, yet obvious everywhere. Bodiless, yet embodied in all things. It is the primal Mind and the ground of being.

In the writings attributed to him, Hermes Trismegistus describes a pure philosophy, not of an intellectual kind, but a focus of the mind in deep meditation on God.

This pure philosophy is a spiritual practice of contemplation used to gain ‘True Knowledge’ of God. Pure philosophy is about rising above opinion and speculation to experience directly the Mind of the Universe.

‘Pure philosophy is spiritual striving, through constant contemplation, to attain True Knowledge of Atum the One-God.’

The spiritual goal of life for a human being is to therefore use the power of our minds to expand our awareness and transcend the limitations of the physical body in order to experience the Mind of God.

For Hermes, spiritual philosophy is entirely compatible with the sciences. In his view the student of spiritual philosophy studies science as a way of learning about the Mind of God. Through science the architecture of God’s Big Mind is revealed to mankind.

‘The student of pure philosophy studies the sciences, not as fanciful theories, but as devotion to Atum - because they reveal a universe perfectly ordered by the power of number; because measuring the depths of the sea and forces of fire and magnitude of physical things leads to reverent awe at the Creator’s skill and wisdom; because the mysteries of music bear witness to the unsurpassed talent of the Supreme Artist who has beautifully harmonised all things into a single Whole, suffused with sweet melodies.’

Prophetically, Hermes writes …

‘But I foresee that, in times to come, clever intellectuals will mislead the minds of men, turning them away from pure philosophy.

It will be taught that our sacred devotion was ineffectual and the heart-felt piety and assiduous service with which we Egyptians honour Atum was a waste without reward.

[…]

Egypt will be forsaken and desolate, bereft of the presence of gods.

It will be overrun by foreigners, who will neglect our sacred ways.

[…]

This land, that was a spiritual teacher to all humankind, which loved the gods with such devotion that they designed to sojourn here on earth - this land will exceed all others in cruelty.

The dead will far outnumber the living, and the survivors will be known as Egyptians by their language alone, for in their actions they will be like men of another race.

O Egypt!

Nothing will remain of your religion but an empty tale, which even your own children will not believe.

Nothing will be left to tell of your wisdom but old graven stones.

Men will be weary of life, and will cease seeing the universe as worthy of reverent wonder.

Spirituality, the greatest of all blessings, will be threatened with extinction, and believed a burden to be scorned.

The world will no longer be loved as an incomparable work of Atum; a glorious monument to his Primal Goodness; an instrument of the Divine Will to evoke veneration and praise in the beholder.

Egypt will be widowed.

Every sacred voice will be silenced.

Darkness will be preferred to light.

No eyes will rise to heaven.

The pure will be though insane and the impure will be honoured as wise.

The madman will be believed brave, and the wicked esteemed as good.

Knowledge of the immortal soul will be laughed at and denied.

No reverent words worthy of heaven will be heard or believed.

So I, Thrice-Great Hermes, the first of all men to attain All-Knowledge, have inscribed the secrets of the gods, in sacred symbols and holy hieroglyphs, on these stone tablets, which I have concealed for a future world that may seek out sacred wisdom.

Through all-seeing Mind, I myself have been the witness of the invisible things of Heaven, and through contemplation come to Knowledge of Truth.

This knowing I have set down in these writings …’

Today we no longer learn about or practice pure philosophy, we instead learn from academics and intellectuals with no mystical understanding of life. Spirituality is dismissed by scientists as a primitive superstition. The profound wisdom of the ancient Egyptians is thought of as a dead religion; merely an archeological curiosity.

Santa Cruz Man

Notes on Philosophy

Why philosophize?

Notes on Universal Consciousness

Notes on Quantum Field Theory