By

Mir Sadia Siddequa Sifat

Whatever is deep
and profound
is philosophy

My Philosophy Book
An Assignment

Presented & Prepared by

 Mir Sadia Siddequa Sifat
I.D.NO: 062-10-263, Batch: -8th A
Department of English
Faculty of Humanities and Social Science
Daffodil International University

Submitted to
Dr. Binoy Barman
Assistant Professor and Head,
Department of English
Faculty of Humanities and Social Science
Daffodil International University

Contents

No. Philosopher Page

1 Arthur Schopenhauer
2 Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
3 Jean-Paul Sartre
4 Karl Heinrich Marx
5 Charles Darwin
6 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
7 René Descartes
8 John Locke
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
9
Hegel
10 Baruch de Spinoza

Arthur Schopenhauer
 Arthur Schopenhauer
Full name Arthur Schopenhauer
Born 22 February 1788 (1788-02-22)
Died 21 September 1860 (aged 72)
Era 19th century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Kantianism, idealism
Main Metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics,
interests phenomenology, morality, psychology
Notable
Will, Fourfold root of reason, pessimism
ideas

Signature
Søren Kierkegaard
 Sketch of Søren Kierkegaard by Niels Christian
Kierkegaard, c. 1840
Full name Søren Aabye Kierkegaard
Born 5 May 1813 Copenhagen, Denmark
11 November 1855 (aged 42) Copenhagen,
Died
Denmark
Era 19th-century philosophy
Region Western philosophy
Danish Golden Age Literary and Artistic
Tradition, precursor to Continental
philosophy,[1][2], Existentialism (agnostic,
School
atheistic, Christian), Postmodernism, Post-
structuralism, Existential psychology,
Absurdism, Neo-orthodoxy, and many more
Religion, metaphysics, epistemology,
Main
aesthetics, ethics, morality, psychology,
interests
philosophy of religion
Regarded as the father of Existentialism,
Notable angst, existential despair, Three spheres of
ideas human existence, knight of faith, infinite
qualitative distinction, leap of faith

Signature

Jean-Paul Sartre
Full name Jean-Paul Sartre
Born 21 June 1905 Paris, France
15 April 1980 (aged 74)
Died
Paris, France
Era 20th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
Existentialism, Continental philosophy,
School
Marxism
Main Metaphysics, Epistemology, Ethics,
interests Politics, Phenomenology, Ontology
Notable "Existence precedes essence", "Bad
ideas faith","Nothingness"

Signature

Karl Marx.
Full name Karl Heinrich Marx
Born May 5, 1818, Trier, Prussia
March 14, 1883 (aged 64)
Died
London, United Kingdom
Era 19th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Marxism, communism, Hegelianism
Main Politics, economics, philosophy, sociology,
interests history, class struggle
Co-founder of Marxism (with Engels),
surplus value, alienation and exploitation
Notable
of the worker, The Communist Manifesto,
ideas
Das Kapital, materialist conception of
history

Signature

Charles Darwin
 12 February 1809
Born Mount House, Shrewsbury,
Shropshire, England
19 April 1882 (aged 73)
Died
Down House, Downe, Kent.
Residence England
Citizenship British
Nationality British
Ethnicity English
Fields Naturalist
Institutions Geological Society of London
Academic John Stevens Henslow
advisors Adam Sedgwick
The Voyage of the Beagle
Known for On The Origin of Species
Natural selection

Signature

Friedrich Nietzsche
Full name Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche
October 15, 1844 Röcken bei Lützen,
Born
Prussia
Died August 25, 1900 , Weimar, Garmen
Era 19th century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
Weimar Classicism; precursor to
Continental philosophy, existentialism,
School
postmodernism, poststructuralism,
psychoanalysis
Main aesthetics, ethics, ontology, philosophy of
interests history, psychology, value-theory
Notable
Apollonian and Dionysian, death of God
ideas

Signature

René Descartes
Full name René Descartes
Born March 31, 1596,France
February 11, 1650 (aged 53)
Died
Stockholm, Sweden
Era 17th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
Cartesianism, Rationalism,
School
Foundationalism
Main Metaphysics, Epistemology, Science,
interests Mathematics
Cogito ergo sum, method of doubt,
Notable Cartesian coordinate system,
ideas Cartesian dualism, ontological
argument

John Locke
Full name John Locke
29 August 1632
Born
Wrington, Somerset, England
28 October 1704 (aged 72)Essex,
Died
England
Era 17th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophers
British Empiricism, Social Contract,
School
Natural Law
Main Metaphysics, Epistemology,
interests Philosophy of Mind, Education
Tabula rasa, "government with the
Notable
consent of the governed"; state of
ideas
nature; liberty and property

Signature
Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Full name Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Born August 27, 1770 Stuttgart, Germany
November 14, 1831 (aged 61)
Died
Berlin, Germany
Era 19th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
German Idealism; Founder of
School
Hegelianism; Historicism
Logic, Philosophy of history,
Main
Aesthetics, Religion, Metaphysics,
interests
Epistemology, Political Philosophy,
Notable Absolute idealism, Dialectic,
ideas Sublation, master-slave dialectic

Signature

Baruch Spinoza
 Full name Baruch de Spinoza
November 24, 1632
Born
Amsterdam, Netherlands
February 21, 1677 (aged 44)
Died
The Hague, Netherlands
Era 17th-century philosophy
Region Western Philosophy
School Rationalism, founder of Spinozism
Main
Ethics, Epistemology, Metaphysics
interests
Panentheism, Pantheism, Deism,
Notable neutral monism, intellectual and
ideas religious freedom / separation of
church and state, not contract
Signature
Baruch Spinoza’s Philosophy

Of the two problems left unsolved by Descartes (the determination of

the relationship God and the world and between the soul and the body),
Spinoza answers the first by affirming the unity of substance and
reducing the world to a modification of this single substance. Neo-
Platonic thought and the definition of substance given by Descartes (that
which so exists as to need no other for its existence) justify, as far as
Spinoza is concerned, the abolition of all duality, and the affirmation of
the oneness of substance. This accomplished, he logically and
inexorably develops all the pantheistic consequences implicit in the
oneness of substance.

The second problem left by Descartes (the relationship between the soul
-- "res cogitans" -- and the body -- "res extensa") remains open and
unsolved in Spinoza. He reduces these two Cartesian substances to two
attributes; and to explain their mutual dependence he is obliged to
affirm dogmatically the existence of the psycho-physical law, in virtue
of which what happens in the "attribute" of the soul automatically finds
its correlative in the "attribute" of the body.

My Own View

Spinoza developed Cartesian Rationalism to its extreme consequences.

He begins with the concept of substance, which, because it does not
require another concept in order to be understood and to exist, is a clear
concept and must be one. But he concludes with the most absolute
pantheism.

Spinoza's system did not meet with good reception at first, perhaps
because it was not understood. Idealism took it over because it found in
it the principal lineaments for a metaphysics in the idealist sense.

Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy

Arthur Schopenhauer believed that Immanuel Kant had either

made, or greatly re-inforced, uniquely important breakthroughs in
human understanding - these included Kant's division of reality into
what was susceptible of being experienced, (the phenomenal), and what
was not, (the noumenal).
 Schopenhauer was greatly influenced by Kant's key insistence
that the forms and frameworks of all possible experience were
dependent on the contingent nature of our bodily apparatus, and would
have been so whatever that apparatus had been.

Starting from the principle that the will is the inner nature of the
body as an appearance in time and space, he concluded that the inner
reality of all material appearances is Will. Where Kant had concluded
that ultimate reality - the "thing-in-itself" (Ding an sich) - lay beyond
being experienced, Schopenhauer postulated that the ultimate reality is
one universal will. This will is the inner nature of each experiencing
being and assumes in time and space the appearance of the body, which
is an idea. Accordingly existence is the expression of an insatiable,
pervasive, will generating a world that features such negatives as
conflict and suffering, senselessness, and futility as well as many
positives. It is the "will to live" that perpetuates this cosmic spectacle.

My Own View

For Schopenhauer, who is considered to be a pessimistic

philosopher, the tragedy of life arises from the nature of the will, which
constantly urges the individual toward the satisfaction of successive
goals, none of which can provide permanent satisfaction for the infinite
activity of the life force, or will.

Such things as an interest in the Arts, and a moral life based on

sympathy, tend to alleviate the suffering experienced in people's lives. A
more telling alleviation is to be found through the denial, or suspension,
of the will through asceticism.

Søren Kierkegaard’s Philosophy

Søren Kierkegaard was a 19th century Danish philosopher who

has been called the "Father of Existentialism”. His philosophy also
influenced the development of existential psychology.
 One of Kierkegaard's recurrent themes is the importance of
subjectivity, which has to do with the way people relate themselves to
(objective) truths. In Concluding Unscientific Postscript to
Philosophical Fragments, he argues that "subjectivity is truth" and "truth
is subjectivity." What he means by this is that most essentially, truth is
not just a matter of discovering objective facts. While objective facts are
important, there is a second and more crucial element of truth, which
involves how one relates oneself to those matters of fact. Since how one
act is, from the ethical perspective, more important than any matter of
fact, truth is to be found in subjectivity rather than objectivity.

Themes in his philosophy:

• Alienation,
• Abstraction,
• Death,
• Dread or anxiety,
• Despair,
• Ethics,
• Individuality,
• Pathos (passion),
• Subjectivity,
• Three stages of life,
Stage One: Aesthetic, Stage Two: Ethical, Stage Three:
Religious.

My Own View
Søren Kierkegaard's philosophy has been a major influence in the
development of 20th century philosophy, especially in the movements
of Existentialism philosophy and Postmodernism. He was the first to
Introduce existentialist questions like Who am I? What is the role of
God in human life? What motivates as to work?
Jean-Paul Sartre’s Philosophy

Educated in his native Paris and at German universities, Jean-Paul

Sartre taught philosophy during the 1930s at La Havre and Paris.
 Sartre's philosophical influences clearly include Descartes, Kant,
Marx, Husserl, and Heidegger. Employing the methods of descriptive
phenomenology to new effect, his l'Être et le néant (Being and
Nothingness) (1943) offers an account of existence in general, including
both the being-in-itself of objects that simply are and the being-for-itself
by which humans engage in independent action. Sartre devotes
particular concern to emotion as a spontaneous activity of consciousness
projected onto reality. Empasizing the radical freedom of all human
action, Sartre warns of the dangers of mauvaise foi (bad faith), acting on
the self-deceptive motives by which people often try to elude
responsibility for what they do.

In the lecture l'Existentialisme est un humanisme ("Existentialism

is a Humanism") (1946), Sartre described the human condition in
summary form: freedom entails total responsibility, in the face of which
we experience anguish, forlornness, and despair; genuine human dignity
can be achieved only in our active acceptance of these emotions.

My Own View

Sartre was an exponent of atheistic existentialism. The philosophy

of existentialism depicts man, alone and afraid in a world he never
made. This philosophical movement has had more of a following in
mainland Europe than in English-speaking countries. The most famous
of the French existentialists was, of course, Jean-Paul Sartre. Sartre's
WW II experience is an example of what existentialists see as the ever-
present necessity for individual choice. His was a very obvious case in
point, a choice which all Frenchmen faced at the time: collaboration,
resistance, or quiet self-preservation.

Karl Marx’s Philosophy

Marx's philosophy hinges on his view of human nature.

Fundamentally, Marx assumed that human nature involves transforming
nature. To this process of transformation he applies the term "labour",
and to the capacity to transform nature the term "labour power." Marx
sees transformation as a simultaneously physical and mental act

Marx had a special concern with how people relate to that most
fundamental resource of all, their own labour power. He wrote
extensively about this in terms of the problem of alienation. As with the
dialectic, Marx began with a Hegelian notion of alienation but
developed a more materialist conception

Capitalism mediates social relationships of production (such as

among workers or between workers and capitalists) through
commodities, including labor, that are bought and sold on the market.
For Marx, the possibility that one may give up ownership of one's own
labor—one's capacity to transform the world—is tantamount to being
alienated from one's own nature; it is a spiritual loss. Marx described
this loss in terms of commodity fetishism, in which the things that
people produce, commodities, appear to have a life and movement of
their own to which humans and their behavior merely adapt.

My Own View

For Marx, unholy self-estrangement, the "loss of man", is

complete once the proletariat realizes its potential to unite in
revolutionary solidarity. His final conclusion is that for Germany,
general human emancipation is only possible as a suspension of private
property by the proletariat, which I really appritiate.

Darwin's theory of evolution is based on five key observations and

inferences drawn from them. These observations and inferences have
been summarized by the great biologist Ernst Mayr as follows:
1) Species have great fertility. They make more offspring than can grow
to adulthood.

2) Populations remain roughly the same size, with modest fluctuations.

3) Food resources are limited, but are relatively constant most of the
time.

From these three observations it may be inferred that in such an

environment there will be a struggle for survival among individuals.

4) In sexually reproducing species, generally no two individuals are

identical. Variation is rampant.

5) Much of this variation is heritable.

Summary Of Darwin's Theory of Evolution;

1.Variation: There is Variation in Every Population.

2.Competition: Organisms Compete for limited resources.
3.Offspring: Organisms produce more Offspring than can survive.
4.Genetics: Organisms pass Genetic traits on to their offspring.
5.Natural Selection: Those organisms with the Most Beneficial Traits
are more likely to Survive and Reproduce.

My Own View
Darwin imagined it might be possible that all life is descended from an
original species from ancient times. DNA evidence supports this idea.
Probably all organic beings which have ever lived on this earth have
descended from some one primordial life form. There is grandeur in this
view of life that, whilst this planet has gone cycling on according to the
fixed law of gravity, from so simple a beginning endless forms most
beautiful and most wonderful have been, and are being evolved.

Friedrich Nietzsche’s Philosophy

 An important element of Nietzsche's philosophical outlook is the
"will to power" (der Wille zur Macht), which provides a basis for
understanding motivation in human behavior. But this concept may have
wider application, as Nietzsche, in a number of places, also suggests that
the will to power is a more important element than pressure for
adaptation or survival

Nietzsche claimed the death of God would eventually lead to the

loss of any universal perspective on things, and along with it any
coherent sense of objective truth. Instead we would retain only our own
multiple, diverse, and fluid perspectives. This view has acquired the
name "perspectivism".

Alternatively, the death of God may lead beyond bare

perspectivism to outright nihilism, the belief that nothing has any
importance and that life lacks purpose. As Heidegger put the problem,
"If God as the suprasensory ground and goal of all reality is dead, if the
suprasensory world of the Ideas has suffered the loss of its obligatory
and above it its vitalizing and upbuilding power, then nothing more
remains to which man can cling and by which he can orient himself."
Developing this idea, Nietzsche wrote Thus Spoke Zarathustra, therein
introducing the concept of a value-creating Übermensch.

My Own View

Certain recent Nietzschean interpretations have emphasized the more

untimely and politically controversial aspects of Nietzsche's philosophy.
Nietzschean commentator Keith Ansell Pearson has pointed out the
absurd hypocrisy of modern egalitarian liberals, socialists, feminists and
anarchists claiming Nietzsche as a herald of their own left-wing politics:
"The values Nietzsche wishes to subject to a revaluation are largely
altruistic and egalitarian values such as pity, self-sacrifice, and equal
rights.

René Descartes’s Philosophy

René Descartes (pronounced "deika:t") was a 17th century French
philosopher, mathematician and a man of science. He could be quite
justifiably called the Father of Modern Philosophy. Descartes is
regarded as the bridge between scholasticism and other schools of
philosophy that followed. He provided a link to physics and philosophy.
It was he who developed the 'X', 'Y' and 'Z' coordinates to locate a point
in 2 or 3 dimensions. We also owe the analytical geometry to him
Thanks to him you are able to use algebra and calculus to solve
geometrical problems. In addition to the convention of exponent
notation, his other contribution to Algebra is the treatment of Negative
Roots.

He asserted that thinking is the sole aim, meaning and purpose of living!
This (in my opinion) is opposed to "Hedonism" which believes in
pleasure as the sole aim of humankind. His theory in a nutshell is 'cogito
ergo sum' meaning, ‘I think, therefore I am' He developed a dualistic
theory of mind (conscious experience) and matter. His approach was of
fundamental importance in the development of modern philosophy,
especially epistemology He has done extensive research on meditation,
reasoning and seeking truth in the sciences. He has extensively dwelt on
the relationship of the soul to the body, the nature of emotions and the
ways of controlling the emotions. He aimed to reach totally secure
foundations for knowledge. His method of systematic doubt to arrive at
the truth laid the foundation for subsequent development of philosophy.
His argument was that the sciences must be founded on certainty. He
invoked skepticism as a means of reaching certainty. Some of his
theories were paradoxical.

My Own View
Descartes held that part of the blood was a subtle fluid, which he called
animal spirits. The animal spirits, he believed, came into contact with
thinking substances in the brain and flowed out along the channels of the
nerves to animate the muscles and other parts of the body! Descartes
also believed that colors were caused by the rotation of "spheres" of
light, using the tennis ball as a model of a spinning sphere.

John Locke’s Philosophy

Francis Bacon and Thomas Hobbes were not truly conscious of the
phenomenalistic consequences of their theory of knowledge, which was
based on Empiricism. Both considered sensation as phenomenal
presentations and also as representations of reality. Thus they still had
something upon which to build an absolute metaphysics.

With Locke gnosiological phenomenalism enters its critical phase. By

considering sensations merely as subjective presentations, Locke gives
us a theory of knowledge of subjective data devoid of any relation with
external objects. Hence Locke is the first to give us a logic for
Empiricism, that is, for sensations considered as phenomena of
knowledge.

Locke distinguishes three classes of complex ideas:

• 1. Ideas of substance, representing a constant or stable

collection of simple ideas related to a mysterious substratum
which is their unifying center;
• 2. Ideas of mode, resulting from the combination by the intellect
of several ideas, in such a manner as to form not a thing in itself
but a property or mode of an existing thing -- for example, a
triangle, gratitude;
• 3. Ideas of relationship, arising from the comparison of one
idea with another, such as temporal and spatial relationships, or
the relationship of cause.

My Own View

From man's natural condition to the state of society, there is hence a

progression; but no innovation is involved. The sovereign who fails in
his obligation to defend the rights of his subjects is no longer justified in
his sovereignty and may be dismissed by his subjects. Locke is
considered the founder of liberal politics (classical liberalism), and his
influence during the centuries following his lifetime has been great.

Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel’s Philosophy

The greatest of all the German idealists was Georg Wilhelm Friedrich
Hegel, who methodically constructed a comprehensive system of
thought about the world. Focussed like Kant on the goal of showing
how some fundamental unity underlies the confusing multiplicity of
experiental contents, Hegel took a much more sytematic approach by
making absolute consciousness the key source of ultimate connections
among all other things. Above all else, Hegel held that reality must be
rational, so that its ultimate structure is revealed in the structure of our
thought. Everything that is thinkable, especially apparent contradictions,
must be resolvable under some common concept of the reason. In what
follows, we will examine in detail the logical apparatus Hegel employed
in pursuit of knowledge.

Even more than Aristotle and the Stoics, Hegel believed that the study
of logic is an investigation into the fundamental structure of reality
itself. According to Hegel, all logic (and, hence, all of reality) is
dialectical in character. As Kant had noted in the Antinomies, serious
thought about one general description of the world commonly leads us
into a contemplation of its opposite. But Hegel did not suppose this to
be the end of the matter; he made the further supposition that the two
concepts so held in opposition can always be united by a shift to some
higher level of thought. Thus, the human mind invariably moves from
thesis to antithesis to synthesis, employing each synthesis as the thesis
for a new opposition to be transcended by yet a higher level, continuing
in a perpetual waltz of intellectual achievement.

My Own View
Hegel's philosophy is a rationalization of his early mysticism, stimulated
by Christian theology. He rejects the reality of finite and separate objects
and minds in space and time, the Kantian "thing-in-itself" and
establishes without Spinoza's dualism, an underlying all-embracing
unity, the Absolute. Only this rational whole is real and true. When we
make statements or otherwise draw attention to a particular, we separate
off this one aspect from the whole of reality, and this can therefore only
be partially true.