John Locke (1632 – 1704) is considered to be one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers. Born in England, he is commonly known as the father of Liberalism and a…
Born in England in 1588, Thomas Hobbes is considered one of the founders of modern political philosophy. He is today best known for his book Leviathan (1651), where he formulated…
What is knowledge? Like Plato, Aristotle recognised that knowledge is only knowledge if it is of something that is true. This truth must be justified in a way which shows…
First of all, what is metaphysics? Metaphysics is one of the main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, aesthetics, logic, epistemology, and others. Aristotle calls metaphysics “first philosophy”, and says…
Plato’s theory of Forms sheds light on his ideas about the soul. First of all, he claims that the body and the soul are distinct. First to exist is the…
Everything we sense is an illusion. Everything we sense is deception. Sounds like The Matrix (1999), or The Truman Show (1998), but it’s actually Plato, almost two and a half…
“A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands that he limit himself to his function as a grocer.…
In Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Sartre formulates his philosophy that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, since human beings have no inherent identity or value, it is through their…
When Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1964, he turned it down saying that he refused official distinctions and did not want to be “institutionalised.”…
Going beyond good and evil means we are in territory not covered by traditional morality.
In ‘On the Genealogy of Morality’, Nietzsche argued that there are two types of morality: master morality and slave morality. “Good” and “evil”, he argued, are concepts that fall squarely under the latter.
“God is dead”, Zarathustra said in Nietzsche’s Thus Spake Zarathustra, “and we have killed him.” Morality had been the domain of religion for centuries and millennia, until now.
Today, calling someone a sophist is often meant in an disapproving way. We often use the term for a certain type of individual: a sleazy politician, a shady lawyer, or…
It is hard to overstate the importance and influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on 20th century thinking. Philosophical theories and approaches such as existentialism, postmodernism, deconstruction, and post-structuralism are all…
One way in which utilitarianism differs from Kantian deontology is in its view of intention and consequences. We covered this in ‘Utilitarianism: Going for the best outcome.’ A follow-up question…
As we have seen in another post, for utilitarianism the value of acts and actions is based on their results. In the utilitarian world, it’s the results of actions that…