John Locke’s state of nature and the social contract
John Locke (1632 – 1704) is considered to be one of the most influential Enlightenment thinkers. Born in England, he
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Thomas Hobbes and the Leviathan
Born in England in 1588, Thomas Hobbes is considered one of the founders of modern political philosophy. He is today
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Aristotle: Man the social thinker
What is knowledge? Like Plato, Aristotle recognised that knowledge is only knowledge if it is of something that is true.
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Aristotle’s metaphysics
First of all, what is metaphysics? Metaphysics is one of the main branches of philosophy, along with ethics, aesthetics, logic,
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Plato: A soul in three parts, and the city-state as a large soul
Plato’s theory of Forms sheds light on his ideas about the soul. First of all, he claims that the body
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Plato’s theory of forms
Everything we sense is an illusion. Everything we sense is deception. Sounds like The Matrix (1999), or The Truman Show
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Sartre on authenticity and bad faith
“A grocer who dreams is offensive to the buyer, because such a grocer is not wholly a grocer. Society demands
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Existentialism, radical freedom, and anguish
In Existentialism is a Humanism (1946), Sartre formulates his philosophy that “existence precedes essence.” In other words, since human beings
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Sartre – freedom, existence, and the Nobel Prize
When Jean-Paul Sartre was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in October 1964, he turned it down saying that he
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Nietzsche – Going beyond good and evil
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.
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Nietzsche and the crisis of morality
“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.
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The Sophists – we are the measure of all things
Today, calling someone a sophist is often meant in an disapproving way. We often use the term for a certain
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Nietzsche: Superman of the 19th century
It is hard to overstate the importance and influence of Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) on 20th century thinking. Philosophical theories and
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Utilitarianism, or Does the end justify the means?
One way in which utilitarianism differs from Kantian deontology is in its view of intention and consequences. We covered this
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Act and Rule utilitarianism
As we have seen in another post, for utilitarianism the value of acts and actions is based on their results.
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