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Philosophy by doctrine (branch of metaphysics) (Existentialism (Proponents…

- - - - social and political movement that began in the early 2000s in favor of atheism and secularism
      - "Four Horsemen of the Non-Apocalypse": Richard Dawkins (1941 - ), Christopher Hitchens (1949 - 2011), Sam Harris (1967 - ) and Daniel Dennett (1942 - )
      - "religion should not simply be tolerated but should be countered, criticized and exposed by rational argument wherever its influence arises"
  - - - Epistemological arguments
        
        people cannot know God or determine the existence of God
        
        Kant
        
        Skepticism
        
        Logical positivism
        
        asserts the meaninglessness or unintelligibility of basic terms such as "God"
    - - physicalism
    - - Marxists
      - Anarchists
      - Psychologists
        
        Archetypal modallng
    - - ascribed logically inconsistent qualities
      - theodicy
    - - favours humanity as the absolute source of ethics and values
- - - - Boyle
      - Descartes
        
        Corpuscularism
        
        everything physical in the universe is made of tiny “corpuscles”
        
        Differs from atomism in terms of no void + inclusion of cartesian dualism
      - John Dalton (1766 - 1844)
        
        Atomic theory
- - - - Recently challenged by the probabilistic nature of quantum mechanics
  - - - Free Will and Determinism are logically incompatible categories and therefore mutually exclusive
      - Hard determinism
        
        Determinism is the reality, and therefore Free Will is an illusion
      - Libertarianism
        
        Free Will is true, and therefore Determinism is not
    - - Free Will is not the ability to choose as an agent independent of prior cause, but as an agent who is not forced to make a certain choice.
        
        Soft determinism
    - - things have essences (the attribute, or set of attributes, that make an object or substance what it fundamentally is)
      - Counter
        
        Nominalism
      - Plato
        
        ideal forms
      - Humanists
        
        eternal and unchangeable human nature
- - - - Idealism
      - Physicalism
  - - - Theory of Forms, distinct and immaterial substances of which the objects and other phenomena that we perceive in the world are nothing more than mere shadows
      - Neo-platonism
        
        Christians identified Plato's Forms with souls and believed that the soul was the substance of each individual human being, while the body was just a shadow or copy of these eternal phenomena
    - - if the intellect were a specific material organ (or part of one) then it would be restricted to receiving only certain kinds of information
    - - mind-body problem
        
        mind with consciousness and self-awareness
        
        brain, which was the physical seat of intelligence
      - the immaterial mind and the material body, while being ontologically distinct substances, causally interact in some unspecified way through the pineal gland.
- - - - the only way to rise above the essentially absurd condition of humanity (which is characterized by suffering and inevitable death) is by exercising our personal freedom and choice
  - - - Sartre put it: "At first [Man] is nothing. Only afterward will he be something, and he himself will have made what he will be."
  - - - individuals must choose their own way without the aid of universal, objective standards
        
        "knight of faith", who puts complete faith in himself and in God
    - - the individual must decide which situations are to count as moral situations
        
        "Übermensch" (or "Superman") attains superiority and transcendence without resorting to the "other-worldliness" of Christianity
    - - meaning is not provided by the natural order, but rather can be created (however provisionally and unstable) by human actions and interpretations.
  - - - Husserl
      - Heidigger
        
        His discussion of ontology is rooted in an analysis of the mode of existence of individual human beings, and his analysis of authenticity and anxiety in modern culture make him very much an Existentialist in the usual modern usage.
    - - Dostoyevsky
      - Kafka
  - - - for projecting some features of living in a modern oppressive society (features such as anxiety and meaninglessness) onto the nature of existence itself.
    - - Heidegger's concept of inauthenticity and Sartre's concept of bad faith are both self-inconsistent, in that they deny any universal moral creed, yet speak of these concepts as if everyone is bound to abide by them.
    - - Scruton
        
        existentialists frequently become confused over the verb "to be" (which is meaningless if used without a predicate) and by the word "nothing" (which is the negation of existence and therefore cannot be assumed to refer to something).
    - - counter to their emphasis on the solidarity of human beings and their theory of economic determinism
      - emphasis on individual choice leads to contemplation rather than to action, and that only the bourgeoisie has the luxury
    - - Amoral society without theological ethics
- - - - Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac
    - - religious discourse is essentially self-referential
- - - - It is also contrasted with Realism (which holds that things have an absolute existence prior to, and independent of, our knowledge or perceptions)
      - objects exist by virtue of our perception of them, as ideas residing in our awareness and in the consciousness of the Divine Being, or God
  - - - Plotinus
    - - Epistemological idealist
    - - Panpsychism
        
        System of monads
        
        he external world of real objects, so that the resulting world is essentially an idea of the monads’ perception
        
        God, the "central monad", created a pre-established harmony between the internal world in the minds of the alert monads
        
        Subjective idealism
    - - knowledge must be based on our perceptions and that there was indeed no "real" knowable object behind one's perception
    - - all we can know is the mental impressions or phenomena that an outside world creates in our minds
      - the mind shapes the world as we perceive it to take the form of space-and-time
      - the mind is not a blank slate but rather comes equipped with categories for organizing our sense impressions, even if we cannot actually approach the noumena (the "things-in-themselves") which emit or generate the phenomena (the "things-as-they-appear-to-us")
      - Transcendental idealism
  - - - mind and ideas are the only things that can be definitely known to exist or have any reality, and that knowledge of anything outside the mind is unjustified
        
        Berkeley
        
        developed it out of the foundations of Empiricism: emphasizes the role of experience and sensory perception in the formation of ideas, while discounting the notion of innate ideas.
        
        "To be is to be perceived or to perceive".
        
        Berkeley further argued that it is God who causes us to experience physical objects by directly willing us to experience matter
    - - our experience of things is about how they appear to us (representations), not about those things as they are in and of themselves.
        
        Kant
        
        Fichte
        
        Schelling
        
        Husserl
    - - the world "out there" is in fact Mind communicating with our human minds. It postulates that there is only one perceiver, and that this perceiver is one with that which is perceived
      - It accepts common sense Realism (the view that independent material objects exist), but rejects Naturalism (the view that the mind and spiritual values have emerged from material things).
      - Schelling
        
        agrees with Berkeley that there is no such thing as matter in the materialist sense, and that spirit is the essence and whole of reality.
        
        However, he argued that there is a perfect parallel between the world of nature and the structure of our awareness of it.
        
        Although, this cannot be true of an individual ego, it can be true of an absolute consciousness. He also objected to the idea that God is separate from the world, arguing that reality is a single, absolute, all-inclusive mind, which he (and Hegel) referred to as "The Absolute Spirit" (or simply "The Absolute").
        
        the Absolute is all of reality: no time, space, relation or event ever exists or occurs outside of it.
      - Hegel
        
        Hegel's system of Objective Idealism has also come under fire for merely substituting the Absolute for God, which does not make anything clearer in the end
    - - Hegel
        
        Like Plato many centuries before him, Hegel argued that the exercise of reason enables the reasoner to achieve a kind of reality (namely self-determination, or "reality as oneself") that mere physical objects like rocks can never achieve.
        
        Hegel started from Kant's position that the mind can not know "things-in-themselves", and asserted that what becomes the real is "Geist" (mind, spirit or soul), which he sees as developing through history, each period having a "Zeitgeist" (spirit of the age).
        
        each person's individual consciousness or mind is really part of the Absolute Mind (even if the individual does not realize this), and he argued that if we understood that we were part of a greater consciousness we would not be so concerned with our individual freedom, and we would agree with to act rationally in a way that did not follow our individual caprice, thereby achieving self-fulfillment.
        
        the interaction of opposites (or dialectics) generates all of the concepts we use in order to understand the world. This occurs both in the individual mind as well as through history. Thus, the absolute ground of being is essentially a dynamic, increasingly complex historical process of necessity that unfolds by itself, ultimately giving rise to all the diversity in the world and in the concepts with which we think and make sense of the world.
        
        Critics
        
        Existentialists have also criticised Hegel for ultimately choosing an essentialistic whole over the particularity of existence.
        
        Schopenhauer objected that The Absolute is just a non-personal substitute for the concept of God.
        
        how spirit externalizes itself and how the concepts it generates can say anything true about nature; otherwise his system becomes just an intricate game involving vacuous concept
- - - - the notion of a synthesis of Georg Hegel's theory of Dialectics
        
        Marx and Engels
        
        Historical Materialism
        
        or human beings to survive, they need to produce and reproduce the material requirements of life, and this production is carried out through a division of labor based on very definite production relations between people. These relations form the economic base of society, and are themselves determined by the mode of production which is in force (e.g. tribal society, ancient society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism), and societies, and their cultural and institutional superstructures, naturally move from stage to stage when the dominant class is displaced by a new emerging class in a social and political upheaval.