Download Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (July 28, 1804 – September 13

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (July 28, 1804 – September 13, 1872) was a
German philosopher and anthropologist. He was the fourth son of the eminent jurist
Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach.
His first book, published anonymously, Gedanken über Tod und Unsterblichkeit
(1830), contains an attack on personal immortality and an advocacy of the
Spinozistic immortality of reabsorption in nature. These principles, combined with his
embarrassed manner of public speaking, debarred him from academic
advancement. After some years of struggling, during which he published his
Geschichte der neueren Philosophie (2 vols., 1833-1837, 2nd ed. 1844), and
Abelard und Heloise (1834, 3rd ed. 1877), he married in 1837 and lived a rural
existence at Bruckberg near Nuremberg, supported by his wife's share in a small
porcelain factory.
In two works of this period, Pierre Bayle (1838) and Philosophie und Christentum
(1839), which deal largely with theology, he held that he had proven "that
Christianity has in fact long vanished not only from the reason but from the life of
mankind, that it is nothing more than a fixed idea."
This attack is followed up in his most important work, Das Wesen des Christentums
(1841), which was translated into English (The Essence of Christianity, by George
Eliot, 1853, 2nd ed. 1881), French, Spanish and Russian. Its aim may be described
shortly as an effort to humanize theology. He lays it down that man, so far as he is
rational, is to himself his own object of thought.
Religion is consciousness of the infinite. Religion therefore is "nothing else than the
consciousness of the infinity of the consciousness; or, in the consciousness of the infinite,
the conscious subject has for his object the infinity of his own nature."
Feuerbach's theme was a derivation of Hegel's speculative theology in which the
Creation remains a part of the Creator, while the Creator remains greater than the
Creation. When the student Feuerbach presented his own theory to professor Hegel,
Hegel refused to reply positively to it.
In part I of his book Feuerbach develops what he calls the "true or anthropological
essence of religion." Treating of God in his various aspects "as a being of the
understanding," "as a moral being or law," "as love" and so on. Feuerbach talks of
how man is equally a conscious being, more so than God because man has placed
upon God the ability of understanding. Man contemplates many things and in doing
so he becomes acquainted with himself. Feuerbach shows that in every aspect God
corresponds to some feature or need of human nature. "If man is to find contentment
in God," he claims, "he must find himself in God."
Thus God is nothing else than man: he is, so to speak, the outward projection of
man's inward nature. This projection is dubbed as a chimaera by Feuerbach, that
God and the idea of a higher being is dependent upon the aspect of benevolence.
Feuerbach states that, “a God who is not benevolent, not just, not wise, is no God,”
and continues to say that qualities are not suddenly denoted as divine because of
their godly association. The qualities themselves are divine therefore making God
divine, indicating that man is capable of understanding and applying meanings of
divinity to religion and not that religion makes a man divine.
The force of this attraction to religion though, giving divinity to a figure like God, is
explained by Feuerbach as God is a being that acts throughout man in all forms.
God, “is the principle of [man's] salvation, of [man's] good dispositions and actions,
consequently [man's] own good principle and nature.” It appeals to man to give
qualities to the idol of their religion because without these qualities a figure such as
God would become merely an object, its importance would become obsolete, there
would no longer be a feeling of an existence for God. Therefore, Feuerbach says,
when man removes all qualities from God, “God is no longer anything more to him
than a negative being.” Additionally, because man is imaginative, God is given traits
and there holds the appeal. God is a part of man through the invention of a God.
Equally though, man is repulsed by God because, “God alone is the being who acts
of himself.”
In part 2 he discusses the "false or theological essence of religion," i.e. the view
which regards God as having a separate existence over against man. Hence arise
various mistaken beliefs, such as the belief in revelation which he believes not only
injures the moral sense, but also "poisons, nay destroys, the divinest feeling in man,
the sense of truth," and the belief in sacraments such as the Lord's Supper, which is
to him a piece of religious materialism of which "the necessary consequences are
superstition and immorality."
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (IPA: [gek vlhlm fidç hegəl])
(August 27, 1770 – November 14, 1831) was a German philosopher, and with
Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, one of the creators
of German idealism.
Hegel discussed a relation between nature and freedom, immanence and
transcendence, and the unification of these dualities without eliminating either pole
or reducing it to the other. His influential conceptions are of speculative logic or
"dialectic," "absolute idealism," "Spirit," the "Master/Slave" dialectic, "ethical life,"
and the importance of history. Hegel introduced a system for understanding the
history of philosophy and the world itself, often described as a progression in which
each successive movement emerges as a solution to the contradictions inherent in
the preceding movement. For example, the French Revolution for Hegel constitutes
the introduction of real individual political freedom into European societies for the
first time in recorded history. But precisely because of its absolute novelty, it is also
absolutely radical: on the one hand the upsurge of violence required to carry out the
revolution cannot cease to be itself, while on the other, it has already consumed its
opponent. The revolution therefore has nowhere to turn but onto its own result: the
hard-won freedom is consumed by a brutal Reign of Terror. History, however,
progresses by learning from its mistakes: only after and precisely because of this
experience can one posit the existence of a constitutional state of free citizens,
embodying both the benevolent organizing power of rational government and the
revolutionary ideals of freedom and equality. Hegel's remarks on the French
revolution led German poet Heinrich Heine to label him "The Orléans of German
Philosophy".
Hegel's writing style is difficult to read; he is described by Bertrand Russell in the
History of Western Philosophy as the single most difficult philosopher to understand.
This is partly because Hegel tried to develop a new form of thinking and logic, which
he called "speculative reason" and which includes the more famous concept of
"dialectic," to try to overcome what he saw as the limitations of both common sense
and of traditional philosophy at grasping philosophical problems and the relation
between thought and reality.
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Teachings
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The concept of freedom through Hegel's method
Hegel's thinking can be understood as a constructive development within the broadly
Platonic tradition that includes Aristotle and Kant. To this list one could add Proclus,
Meister Eckhart, Leibniz, Bahlsen, Spinoza, Plotinus, Jakob Boehme, and
Rousseau. What all these thinkers share, which distinguishes them from materialists
like Epicurus, the Stoics, and Thomas Hobbes, and from empiricists like David
Hume, is that they regard freedom or self-determination both as real and as having
important ontological implications, for soul or mind or divinity. This focus on freedom
is what generates Plato's notion (in the Phaedo, Republic, and Timaeus) of the soul
as having a higher or fuller kind of reality than inanimate objects possess. While
Aristotle criticizes Plato's "Forms," he preserves Plato's preoccupation with the
ontological implications of self-determination, in his conceptions of ethical reasoning,
the hierarchy of soul in nature, the order of the cosmos, and the prime mover. Kant,
likewise, preserves this preoccupation of Plato's in his notions of moral and
noumenal freedom, and God.
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (IPA: [hsrl]; April 8, 1859 – April 26, 1938)
was a philosopher, known as the father of phenomenology. His work was a break
with the purely positivist orientation and understanding of the science and
philosophy of his day, giving weight to subjective experience as the source of all of
our knowledge of objective phenomena.
In these first works he tries to combine mathematics, psychology and philosophy
with a main goal to provide a sound foundation for mathematics. He analyzes the
psychological process needed to obtain the concept of number and then tries to
build up a systematical theory on this analysis. To achieve this he uses several
methods and concepts taken from his teachers. From Weierstrass he derives the
idea that we generate the concept of number by counting a certain collection of
objects. From Brentano and Stumpf he takes over the distinction between proper
and improper presenting. In an example Husserl explains this in the following way: if
you are standing in front of a house, you have a proper, direct presentation of that
house, but if you are looking for it and ask for directions, then these directions (e.g.
the house on the corner of this and that street) are an indirect, improper
presentation. In other words, you can have a proper presentation of an object if it is
actually present, and an improper (or symbolic as he also calls it) if you only can
indicate that object through signs, symbols, etc. Husserl's 1901 Logical
Investigations is considered the starting point for the formal theory of wholes and
their parts known as mereology.[1]
Another important element that Husserl took over from Brentano is intentionality, the
notion that the main characteristic of consciousness is that it is always intentional.
While often simplistically summarised as "aboutness" or the relationship between
mental acts and the external world, Brentano defined it as the main characteristic of
mental phenomena, by which they could be distinguished from physical phenomena.
Every mental phenomenon, every psychological act has a content, is directed at an
object (the intentional object). Every belief, desire etc. has an object that they are
about: the believed, the wanted. Brentano used the expression "intentional
inexistence" to indicate the status of the objects of thought in the mind. The property
of being intentional, of having an intentional object, was the key feature to
distinguish mental phenomena and physical phenomena, because physical
phenomena lack intentionality altogether.
Husserl expressed clearly the difference between meaning and object. He identified
several different kinds of names. For example, there are names that have the role of
properties that uniquely identify an object. Each of these names express a meaning
and designate the same object. Examples of this are "the victor in Jena" and "the
loser in Waterloo", or "the equilateral triangle" and "the equiangular triangle"; in both
cases, both names express different meanings, but designate the same object.
There are names which have no meaning, but have the role of designating an
object: "Aristotle", "Socrates", and so on. Finally, there are names which designate a
variety of objects. These are called "universal names"; their meaning is a "concept"
and refers to a series of objects (the extension of the concept). The way we know
sensible objects is called "sensible intuition".
Husserl also identifies a series of "formal words" which are necessary to form
sentences and have no sensible correlates. Examples of formal words are "a", "the",
"more than", "over", "under", "two", "group", and so on. Every sentence must contain
formal words to designate what Husserl calls "formal categories". There are two
kinds of categories: meaning categories and formal-ontological categories. Meaning
categories relate judgments; they include forms of conjunction, disjunction, forms of
plural, among others. Formal-ontological categories relate objects and include
notions such as set, cardinal number, ordinal number, part and whole, relation, and
so on. The way we know these categories is through a faculty of understanding
called "categorial intuition".
Through sensible intuition our consciousness constitutes what Husserl calls a
"situation of affairs" (Sachlage). It is a passive constitution where objects themselves
are presented to us. To this situation of affairs, through categorial intuition, we are
able to constitute a "state of affairs" (Sachverhalt). One situation of affairs through
objective acts of consciousness (acts of constituting categorially) can serve as the
basis for constituting multiple states of affairs. For example, suppose a and b are
two sensible objects in a certain situation of affairs. We can use it as basis to say,
"a<b" and "b>a", two judgments which designate different states of affairs. For
Husserl a sentence has a proposition or judgment as its meaning, and refers to a
state of affairs which has a situation of affairs as a reference base.
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Philosophy of logic and mathematics
Edmund Husserl held the belief that truth-in-itself has as ontological correlate beingin-itself, just as meaning categories have formal-ontological categories as correlates.
The discipline of logic is a formal theory of judgment, that studies the formal a priori
relations among judgments using meaning categories. Mathematics, on the other
hand, is formal ontology, it studies all the possible forms of being (of objects). So, in
both of these disciplines, formal categories, in their different forms, are the objects of
study, not the sensible objects themselves. The problem with the psychological
approach to mathematics and logic is that it fails to account for the fact that it is
about formal categories, not abstractions from sensibility alone. The reason why we
do not deal with sensible objects in mathematics is because of another faculty of
understanding called "categorial abstraction". Through this faculty we are able to get
rid of sensible components of judgments, and just focus on formal categories
themselves.
Thanks to "eidetic intuition" (or "essential intuition"), we are able to grasp the
possibility, impossibility, necessity and contingency among concepts or among
formal categories. Categorial intuition, along with categorial abstraction and eidetic
intuition, are the basis for logical and mathematical knowledge.
Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976) (pronounced [ma
tin
ha
dg]) was an influential German philosopher. His best known book, Being
and Time, is generally considered to be one of the key philosophical works of the
20th century.
Heidegger claimed that Western philosophy has, since Plato, misunderstood what it
means for something to be, tending to approach this question in terms of a being,
rather than asking about being itself. In other words, Heidegger believed all
investigations of being have historically focused on particular entities and their
properties, or have treated being itself as an entity, or substance, with properties. A
more authentic analysis of being would, for Heidegger, investigate "that on the basis
of which beings are already understood," or that which underlies all particular
entities and allows them to show up as entities in the first place.[1] But since
philosophers and scientists have overlooked the more basic, pre-theoretical ways of
being from which their theories derive, and since they have incorrectly applied those
theories universally, they have confused our understanding of being and human
existence. To avoid these deep-rooted misconceptions, Heidegger believed
philosophical inquiry must be conducted in a new way, through a process of
retracing the steps of the history of philosophy.
Heidegger argued that this misunderstanding, commencing from Plato, has left its
traces in every stage of Western thought. All that we understand, from the way we
speak to our notions of "common sense," is susceptible to error, to fundamental
mistakes about the nature of being. These mistakes filter into the terms through
which being is articulated in the history of philosophy—reality, logic, God,
consciousness, presence, et cetera. In his later philosophy, Heidegger argues that
this profoundly affects the way in which human beings relate to modern technology.
His work has exercised a deep influence on philosophy, theology and the
humanities, being key to the development of existentialism, hermeneutics,
deconstruction, postmodernism, and continental philosophy in general. Heidegger's
thought directly informs the works of major philosophers such as Karl Jaspers, Leo
Strauss, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Lévinas, Hannah
Arendt, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Michel Foucault, Richard Rorty, and Jacques
Derrida.
Heidegger infamously supported National Socialism. This has provoked fierce
debate among and between supporters and detractors: some see it as a personal
folly largely irrelevant to his philosophy, while others think it reveals flaws inherent in
his thought.
Heidegger attempts to marry two insights.
The first of these is Heidegger’s insight that, in the course of over two thousand
years of history, philosophy has attended to all the beings that can be found in
the world (including the “world” itself), but has forgotten to ask what “being” itself
is. This is Heidegger’s “question of being,” and it is Heidegger’s fundamental
concern throughout his work from the beginning of his career until its end. One
crucial source of this insight was Heidegger’s reading of Franz Brentano’s
treatise on Aristotle’s manifold uses of the word “being,” a work which provoked
Heidegger to ask what kind of unity underlies this multiplicity of uses. Heidegger
opens his magnum opus, Being and Time, with a citation from Plato’s Sophist [6]
indicating that Western philosophy has neglected “being” because it was
considered obvious, rather than as worthy of question. Heidegger’s intuition
about the question of being is thus a historical argument, which in his later work
becomes his concern with the “history of being,” that is, the history of the
forgetting of being, which according to Heidegger requires that philosophy
retrace its footsteps through a productive “destruction” of the history of
philosophy.
The second intuition animating Heidegger’s philosophy derives from the influence
of Edmund Husserl, a philosopher largely uninterested in questions of
philosophical history. Rather, Husserl argued that all that philosophy could and
should be is a description of experience (hence the phenomenological slogan, “to
the things themselves”). But for Heidegger, this meant understanding that
experience is always already situated in a world and in ways of being. Thus
Husserl's understanding that all consciousness is "intentional" (in the sense that
it is always intended toward something, and is always "about" something;
intentionality has been called the "aboutness" of things) is transformed in
Heidegger's philosophy, becoming the thought that all experience is grounded in
"care." This is the basis of Heidegger’s “existential analytic,” as he develops it in
Being and Time. Heidegger argues that to be able to describe experience
properly means finding the being for whom such a description might matter.
Heidegger thus conducts his description of experience with reference to
“Dasein," the being for whom being is a question.[7] In Being and Time,
Heidegger criticized the abstract and metaphysical character of traditional ways
of grasping human existence as rational animal, person, man, soul, spirit, or
subject. Dasein, then, is not intended as a way of conducting a "philosophical
anthropology," but is rather understood by Heidegger to be the condition of
possibility for anything like a "philosophical anthropology."[8] Dasein, according to
Heidegger, is care. In the course of his existential analytic, Heidegger argues that
Dasein, who finds itself thrown into the world amidst things and with others, is
thrown into its possibilities, including the possibility and inevitability of one’s own
mortality. The need for Dasein to assume these possibilities, that is, the need to
be responsible for one’s own existence, is the basis of Heidegger’s notions of
authenticity and resoluteness—that is, of those specific possibilities for Dasein
which depend on escaping the “vulgar” temporality of calculation and of public
life.
The marriage of these two insights depends on the fact that each of them is
essentially concerned with time. That Dasein is thrown into an already existing world
and thus into its mortal possibilities does not only mean that Dasein is an essentially
temporal being; it also implies that the description of Dasein can only be carried out
in terms inherited from the Western tradition itself. For Heidegger, unlike for Husserl,
philosophical terminology could not be divorced from the history of the use of that
terminology, and thus genuine philosophy could not avoid confronting questions of
language and meaning. The existential analytic of Being and Time was thus always
only a first step in Heidegger’s philosophy, to be followed by the “destruction” of the
history of philosophy, that is, a transformation of its language and meaning, that
would have made of the existential analytic only a kind of “limit case” (in the sense in
which special relativity is a limit case of general relativity).