Kant, Bentham, Hegel, Schopenhauer-LH 19-23. FL 19-20, HWT 20-22. PRESENTATIONS: 1. Immanuel Kant vs. Jeremy Bentham: Is ethics about creating the greatest happiness for the greatest number? #6 Becky Vorabouth; #9 Nicholas Miller; 2. Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of pessimism - #6 Sameria Bohanon; #9 Karmina Ghobrial 3. The rise of virtue ethics - #6 Daniel S.; Moksa and Nirvana - #9 Kaylee [FL 19-20 or HWT 20-22]... #9 Gerges Cosmic philosophy
LH
1. Kant said we can know the ____ but not the ____ world.2. What was Kant's great insight?
3. What, according to Kant, is irrelevant to morality?
4. Kant said you should never ___, because ___. Kant called the principle that supports this view the ____ _____.
5. Who formulated the Greatest Happiness principle? What did he call his method? Where can you find him today?
6. Who created a thought experiment that seems to refute Bentham's view of how pleasure relates to human motivation?
7. What did Hegel mean when he spoke of the "owl of Minerva"? What did he think had been reached in his lifetime?
8. What Kantian view did Hegel reject?
9. What is Geist? When did Hegel say it achieved self-knowledge?
10. What "blind driving force" did Schopenhauer allege to pervade absolutely everything (including us)?
11. What did Schopenhauer say could help us escape the cycle of striving and desire?
HWT
1. What one word most characterizes the ideal Chinese way of life?
2. Western suspicion of hierarchy is built on what?
3. What did the late Archbishop Tutu say was "the greatest good"?
4. What omission in western ethics would seem bizarre to the classical Chinese thinkers?
5. What is the most famous Confucian maxim?
6. Virtue is never solitary, said Confucius, it always has ____.
FL
1. How, according to Scientific American in 1915, are motion pictures like drugs?
2. What came into existence simultaneously with America and created the concept of celebrity?
3. What place did film critic Pauline Kael call a "fantasy-brothel"?
- Do you think the human mind and its categories are like rose-colored spectacles, permanently preventing us from knowing the "noumenal" world but enabling us to see the "phenomena" more clearly? 111-12
- Was Kant's "great insight" really a breakthrough? 114
- Is sympathy irrelevant to morality? 115
- Have you ever helped someone because you felt sorry for them? Was that a moral action on your part?
- Should you ever lie? Is Kant's reasoning on this question reasonable, or rational? Is it emotionally intelligent? 117-18
- What do you think of Jeremy Bentham's auto-icon?
- Do you agree with the Greatest Happiness Principle? 122 Why or why not?
- Is a Felicific Calculus possible or desirable? 123
- Would you plug in to the Experience Machine? 125 Do you think virtual reality technology will one day make that a real option?
- If wisdom and understanding come only at a "later stage" of history, is philosophy worth doing now? 126
- Should Hegel have rejected Kant's view about noumena and phenomena? 128
- Is Geist real? Is there a "single mind" shared by all humanity? 129
- Was Hegel being arrogant to claim that Spirit first came to "know itself" in his own books?
- Was Schopenhauer right about Will? 133
- Is asceticism "the ideal way to cope with existence"? 136
- Has the film industry narrowed the perceived distance between fantasy and reality? Is it like a drug? 136-7
- Is advertising manipulative and misleading? Has it engendered false desires and a confusion about what will make us happy? 138
- Do you think you would have been fooled by War of the Worlds?
- Are Americans too preoccupied with celebrity, and celebrities? 140
- Is the American suburb a mistake, a "happy fictionalization"? 143 Is suburban nostalgia racist? 144
- What do you think of LA and South Florida as fantasylands? 147-8 Do you want to live there?
- Did you know there's a Confucius Institute at MTSU? 222 Should there be a Western Philosophy Institute in China?
- Are there other "bonds" of harmony besides those noted by Mencius? 223
- What's the difference between harmony and conformity, compliance, sameness, or uniformity?
- Would we have a more eastern attitude about harmony and cosmic order in the west if Heraclitus (and Hegel) had "won out" over Plato? 225
- Do the Chinese actually have greater "family values" than westerners? 227
- Would you ever denounce your parents for political reasons?
- Do you feel a moral obligation to visit (and perhaps eventually care for) elderly relatives? 228
- Is Kant's view about Enlightenment and "maturity" an implicit critique of hierarchical and monarchical societies? 230
- Do you know any parents who try "to maintain their authority over their children after those children have grown up"? 231
- Is it disrespectful not to criticize others' views when you disagree with them? 234
- What do you think of people who are "beyond care" and have "given up"? 235
- Is/are "yin/yang" two things, or one? 237 Or are they things at all? 238
- Any comment on "picking yin"? 239 (Keep it clean please.)
- Are Daoists libertarians? 242
- Is the Confucian principle of quan anti-Kantian? 243 How about the African concept of ubuntu? 246
- Was Han China's version of Machiavelli? 244-5
Schopenhauer and his sidekick "Atman"
- “The assumption that animals are without rights and the illusion that our treatment of them has no moral significance is a positively outrageous example of Western crudity and barbarity. Universal compassion is the only guarantee of morality.”
- “Compassion for animals is intimately associated with goodness of character, and it may be confidently asserted that he who is cruel to animals cannot be a good man.”
- “Every miserable fool who has nothing at all of which he can be proud, adopts as a last resource pride in the nation to which he belongs; he is ready and happy to defend all its faults and follies tooth and nail, thus reimbursing himself for his own inferiority.”
- "Man can do what he wills but he cannot will what he wills.”
- “We forfeit three-fourths of ourselves in order to be like other people.”
- “A sense of humor is the only divine quality of man.”
- “What disturbs and depresses young people is the hunt for happiness on the firm assumption that it must be met with in life. From this arises constantly deluded hope and so also dissatisfaction. Deceptive images of a vague happiness hover before us in our dreams, and we search in vain for their original. Much would have been gained if, through timely advice and instruction, young people could have had eradicated from their minds the erroneous notion that the world has a great deal to offer them.”
- “If children were brought into the world by an act of pure reason alone, would the human race continue to exist? Would not a man rather have so much sympathy with the coming generation as to spare it the burden of existence, or at any rate not take it upon himself to impose that burden upon it in cold blood?”
Schopenhauer on Hegel:
“But the height of audacity in serving up pure nonsense, in stringing together senseless and extravagant mazes of words, such as had previously been known only in madhouses, was finally reached in Hegel, and became the instrument of the most barefaced general mystification that has ever taken place, with a result which will appear fabulous to posterity, and will remain as a monument to German stupidity.”
Arthur Schopenhauer, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, trans. Haldane-Kemp (The World as Will and Idea, vol. 2), London: Kegan Paul, p. 22.
What's nausea but a kind of -ausea?
Sober, drunk, -unk, astonishment.
Everything can become the subject of criticism—how
criticise without something to criticise?
Agreement—disagreement!!
Emotion—motion!!!
Die away from, from, die away (without the from).
Reconciliation of opposites; sober, drunk, all the same!
Good and evil reconciled in a laugh!
It escapes, it escapes!
But——
What escapes, WHAT escapes?
Emphasis, EMphasis; there must be some emphasis in order
for there to be a phasis.
No verbiage can give it, because the verbiage is other.
Incoherent, coherent—same.
And it fades! And it's infinite! AND it's infinite!
If it was n't going, why should you hold on to it?
Don't you see the difference, don't you see the identity?
Constantly opposites united!
The same me telling you to write and not to write!
Extreme—extreme, extreme! Within the extensity that
'extreme' contains is contained the 'extreme' of intensity.
Something, and other than that thing!
Intoxication, and otherness than intoxication.
Every attempt at betterment,—every attempt at otherment,—is a——.
It fades forever and forever as we move.
Reconciliation—econciliation!
By God, how that hurts! By God, how it does n't hurt!
Reconciliation of two extremes.
By George, nothing but othing!
That sounds like nonsense, but it is pure onsense!
Thought deeper than speech——!
Medical school; divinity school, school! SCHOOL! Oh my
God, oh God, oh God!
==
Arts & Letters Daily search results for “schopenhauer” (5)
Podcasts:
Kant's Categorical Imperative
In Our Time-Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss how, in the Enlightenment, Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) sought to define the difference between right and wrong by applying reason, looking at the intention behind actions rather than at consequences. He was inspired to find moral laws by natural philosophers such as Newton and Leibniz, who had used reason rather than emotion to analyse the world around them and had identified laws of nature. Kant argued that when someone was doing the right thing, that person was doing what was the universal law for everyone, a formulation that has been influential on moral philosophy ever since and is known as the Categorical Imperative. Arguably even more influential was one of his reformulations, echoed in The Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in which he asserted that humanity has a value of an entirely different kind from that placed on commodities. Kant argued that simply existing as a human being was valuable in itself, so that every human owed moral responsibilities to other humans and was owed responsibilities in turn.
Utilitarianism
In Our Time-A moral theory that emphasises ends over means, Utilitarianism holds that a good act is one that increases pleasure in the world and decreases pain. The tradition flourished in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries with Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill, and has antecedents in ancient philosophy. According to Bentham, happiness is the means for assessing the utility of an act, declaring "it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong." Mill and others went on to refine and challenge Bentham's views and to defend them from critics such as Thomas Carlyle, who termed Utilitarianism a "doctrine worthy only of swine."
Schopenhauer
In Our Time-Melvyn Bragg and guests AC Grayling, Beatrice Han-Pile and Christopher Janaway discuss the dark, pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer.As a radical young thinker in Germany in the early 19th century, Schopenhauer railed against the dominant ideas of the day. He dismissed the pre-eminent German philosopher Georg Hegel as a pompous charlatan, and turned instead to the Enlightenment thinking of Immanuel Kant for inspiration. Schopenhauer's central idea was that everything in the world was driven by the Will - broadly, the ceaseless desire to live. But this, he argued, left us swinging pointlessly between suffering and boredom. The only escape from the tyranny of the Will was to be found in art, and particularly in music. Schopenhauer was influenced by Eastern philosophy, and in turn his own work had an impact well beyond the philosophical tradition in the West, helping to shape the work of artists and writers from Richard Wagner to Marcel Proust, and Albert Camus to Sigmund Freud
Hegel's Philosophy of Right
Free Thinking-What links Beethoven & Hegel's philosophy of freedom? Anne McElvoy talks to New Generation Thinker Seán Williams, Christoph Schuringa, Gary Browning, and Alison Stone about Hegel's discussion of freedom, law, family, markets and the state in his Principles of the Philosophy of Right 1820.
Hegel on Dialectic-In this episode of the Philosophy Bites podcast Robert Stern gives a lucid overview of a key idea from a notoriously difficult writer, Hegel. Listen to Robert Stern on Hegel on Dialectic
LH
ReplyDelete1. Phenomenal, noumenal
2. “His great insight was that we could, by the power of reason, discover features of our own minds that tint all our experience.”
3. Sympathy is irrelevant to morality.
4. lie, it is morally wrong, Categorical Imperative
5. Jeremy Bentham formulated the Greatest Happiness principle. It is also known as utilitarianism. It is the idea that the right decision to make is one that creates the most happiness. Bentham can be found in front of the University College London in a glass case.
6. Robert Nozick created a thought experiment that refutes Bentham’s view.
7. It is Hegel’s way of telling the readers that “wisdom and understanding in the course of human history will only come fully at a late stage” since the name “Minerva” was from a Roman goddess of wisdom. Hegel thought that a crucial stage in history was reached during his own lifetime.
8. Hegel rejected Kant’s view on noumenal reality.
9. Geist is a German word for spirit but some would translate it as mind. Geist achieves full self-knowledge when full self-understanding by Spirit occurs.
10. Will is the blind driving force.
11. Music is the best art form to escape the cycle of striving and desire.
HWT
1. Harmony characterizes the ideal Chinese way of life.
2. It is built on two pillars. One is based on feudalism and absolute monarchy and the other is embracing the autonomous, free rational agent.
3. Social harmony is “the greatest good.”
4. Omission of self-cultivation would seem bizarre to classical Chinese thinkers.
5. “Do not impose upon others what you yourself do not desire.”
6. It always has neighbors.
FL
1. Motion pictures are like drugs to Scientific American because time can be eliminated between two events to make it appear like it happened in the same time frame.
2. “Newspapers and magazines, the first foundations of modern celebrity” came into existence. Newspaper publicity and photography created the concept of celebrity.
3. Kael called Los Angeles a “fantasy-brothel.”
Section 6.
LH
ReplyDeleteSection 6
1. Kant said we can know the phenomenal world but not the Noumenal world.
2. Kant thought that we could, “by the power of reason, discover features of our minds that tint all our experience.”
3. Kant said that our sympathy is irrelevant to the morality of our actions.
4. Kant thought that you should never lie because you can’t make a general principle that everyone should lie when it suits them. Kant called it a Categorical Imperative.
5. Bentham formulated the Greatest Happiness principal and he called it utilitarianism. Bentham can be found in a glass case at the University College of London.
6. Robert Nozick
7. Hegel meant that wisdom and understanding would only be fully accomplished in a late stage of human history as were looking back. He believed a crucial stage in history had been reached in his lifetime.
8. Hegel rejected Kant’s view that noumenal reality lies beyond the phenomenal world.
9. Geist is the word for spirit in German, Hegel most likely meant it as the single mind of all humanity. Geist reaches self-knowledge after following his dialectical method of challenging ideas, and from those two opposite positions a new position emerges that you then challenge again.
10. Will.
11. Art. Specifically, Music.
LH Section #9
ReplyDelete1. Kant said we can know the phenomenal but not the noumenal world.
2. Kant believed that we could use the power of
reason to discover features of our own minds that tint all our
experience.
3. Your sympathy, or your emotions, are irrelevant to morality.
4. Kant thought that you should never lie under any circumstances because you can't make lying a general principle.
5. Jeremy Bentham came up with the Greatest Happiness Principle, and his method for calculating happiness is called the the Felicific Calculus. His remains are in a glass case at the University of London.
Section 6
ReplyDelete1. Kant said we can know the ____ but not the ____ world.
Phenomenal; Noumenal
2. What was Kant's great insight?
Kant’s great insight was that we could, by the power of reason, discover features of our own minds that tint all our experiences.
3. What, according to Kant, is irrelevant to morality?
Kant thought that sympathy or emotions were irrelevant to the morality of your actions.
4. Kant said you should never ___, because ___. Kant called the principle that supports this view the ____ _____.
Lie; It is morally wrong; Categorical Imperative
5. Who formulated the Greatest Happiness principle? What did he call his method? Where can you find him today?
Jeremy Bentham; Bentham called his method utilitarianism; He can be found in a glass case at the University College London.
6. Who created a thought experiment that seems to refute Bentham's view of how pleasure relates to human motivation?
Robert Nozick
7. What did Hegel mean when he spoke of the "owl of Minerva"? What did he think had been reached in his lifetime?
Hegel spoke about how wisdom and understanding in the course of human history will only come fully at a late stage; A crucial stage in history had been reached.
8. What Kantian view did Hegel reject?
Hegel rejected Kant’s view that noumenal reality lies beyond the phenomenal world.
9. What is Geist? When did Hegel say it achieved self-knowledge?
A Geist is a German word for spirit; Hegel said it achieved self-knowledge once full self-understanding by the spirit occurs.
10. What "blind driving force" did Schopenhauer allege to pervade absolutely everything (including us)?
The blind driving force is the will.
11. What did Schopenhauer say could help us escape the cycle of striving and desire?
Schopenhauer said to become an ascetic, which were people who lived a life of sexual chastity and poverty.
Section 009
ReplyDeleteLH
1.)The phenomenal world, not the noumenal world
2.)His great insight was that we could discover features of our own minds
3.) According to Kant, your sympathy is irrelevant to morality
4.) Kant thought you should never lie because it was always morally wrong. This was the general principle according to Kant.
5.) Bentham formulated the Greatest happiness theory. You can find Jeremy Bentham in the University College London (dead) in a glass case. He called his method the Felicific Calculus.
6.)Robert Nozick refuted Bentham's view.
Section 6
ReplyDeleteLH
1. Phenomenal, noumenal
2. Kant's great insight was that we could, “ by the power of reason, discover features of our own minds that tint all our experience.”
3. According to Kant, Sympathy is irrelevant to morality.
4. Lie; It is morally wrong; Categorical Imperative
5. Jeremy Bentham; Bentham called his method utilitarianism; He can be found in a glass case at the University College London.
6. Robert Nozick created a thought experiment that seems to refute Bentham's view of how pleasure relates to human motivation.
7. Hegel meant that wisdom and understanding would only be fully accomplished in a late stage of human history as we are looking back. He believed a crucial stage in history had been reached in his lifetime.
8. Hegel rejected Kant’s view on noumenal reality.
9. A Geist is a German word for spirit; Hegel said it achieves self-knowledge once full self-understanding by the spirit occurs.
10. The blind driving force is the will.
11.Art provides a still point so that, for a short time, we can escape the endless cycle of striving and desire. Music is the best art form for this.
HWT
1. Harmony characterizes the ideal Chinese way of life.
2. Western suspicion of hierarchy is built on two pillars. “ One is a justice-based rejection of oppressive political structures such as feudalism and absolute monarchy.” The other is an embrace of the Enlightenment ideal of the autonomous, free rational agent.
3. Social harmony is “the greatest good
4. Omission of self-cultivation would seem bizarre to classical Chinese thinkers.
5. the most famous Confucian maxim “Do not impose upon others what you yourself do not desire.”
6. Virtue is never solitary, said Confucius, it always has neighbors.