Nineteenth-Century-Philosophy

Arthur Schopenhauer Born in Danzig in 1788, into a wealthy merchant family, Arthur Schopenhauer was able to devote himself to philosophy with financial independence. He earned his doctorate with On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason (1813) and at thirty published his major work, The World as Will and Representation (1818) — which, however, was almost entirely ignored for decades. Hostile to the then-dominant Hegel, he even scheduled his lectures at the same hour as his rival’s in Berlin, to no audience. Recognition came only at the end of his life, in the 1850s. He was also the first major Western philosopher to engage seriously with Indian thought (the Upanishads and Buddhism). ...

Auguste Comte French philosopher; founder of positivism and father of sociology as a scientific discipline. Disciple of Saint-Simon; proposed to reorganize society on scientific bases following the dual revolution (French and industrial). Key Concepts Law of Three Stages: each science and each society passes through three historical stages: Theological: explanation by supernatural agents (fetishism → polytheism → monotheism) Metaphysical: explanation by forces and abstract essences Positive (scientific): explanation by observable and measurable laws — the only valid stage Positivism: only knowledge based on observable facts and verifiable relations is legitimate; rejection of metaphysics and theology as immature Hierarchy of Sciences: mathematics → astronomy → physics → chemistry → biology → sociology (the most complex and most recent) Sociology: positive science of society — Social Physics; divided into statics (order, structure) and dynamics (progress, change) Religion of Humanity: late phase — Comte proposed replacing God with Humanity as the object of worship, with rituals and positivist calendar (Positive Politics) Influenced by Saint-Simon — social reorganization through science and industrialism Condorcet — historical progress and human perfectibility Montesquieu — laws in social history French Enlightenment — reason and science Influenced Émile Durkheim — scientific sociology John Stuart Mill — methodology and positivism (with reservations) Twentieth-century logical positivism (distant reading) Brazil — the motto “Order and Progress” on the flag is directly Comtean Works Course in Positive Philosophy (6 vols., 1830–1842); Discourse on the Positive Spirit (1844); System of Positive Politics (4 vols., 1851–1854). ...

Friedrich Nietzsche The son of a Lutheran pastor, Friedrich Nietzsche was born in Röcken, Prussia, in 1844. A precocious classical philologist, he became a professor at the University of Basel at the age of 24 — before he had even completed his doctorate. His admiration for, and later break with, the composer Richard Wagner, together with his fragile health, led him to give up the chair in 1879 and to live as a solitary wanderer through Switzerland and Italy, writing his most important books. In January 1889, in Turin, he suffered a mental collapse from which he never recovered: he spent his last eleven years incapacitated, and his unpublished work was in part distorted by his sister Elisabeth — even though Nietzsche himself had vehemently rejected German nationalism and antisemitism. ...

Friedrich Schleiermacher Friedrich Daniel Ernst Schleiermacher was born in Breslau (present-day Wrocław, Poland) on 21 November 1768 and died in Berlin on 12 February 1834. Son of a Reformed army chaplain, he studied at the Moravian seminary in Barby and subsequently at Halle. He became a preacher in Berlin, held a professorship in Halle (1804–1807), and from 1810 was professor of theology and philosophy at the newly founded University of Berlin — of which he was one of the principal intellectual architects, alongside Wilhelm von Humboldt and Fichte. ...

Gottlob Frege A German mathematician born in 1848, Gottlob Frege spent almost his entire career as a professor at Jena, in relative obscurity — his genius would be fully recognized only after his death, in 1925, above all thanks to Russell, Wittgenstein, and the Vienna Circle. Today he is regarded as the founder of modern logic and one of the fathers of analytic philosophy. His first great achievement was the creation, in the Begriffsschrift (1879), of a predicate logic that retired the old Aristotelian syllogistic: with quantifiers (“for all,” “there exists”), variables, and functions, Frege gave logic the precision and expressive power it needed to analyze mathematics. His larger aim was logicism — to demonstrate that arithmetic reduces to pure logic. The project, set out in the Basic Laws of Arithmetic, was struck head-on by a letter from Russell (1902) revealing a contradiction in the system; Frege never fully recovered from the blow. ...

Jeremy Bentham Founder of Utilitarianism. English jurist and philosopher; radical social reformer. His skeleton (Auto-Icon) is displayed at University College London, in accordance with his will. Key Concepts Principle of Utility: every action should be judged by its result — the greatest happiness for the greatest number Psychological hedonism: nature has placed mankind under two sovereign masters — pleasure and pain Felicific Calculus (felicific calculus): measuring pleasures and pains by intensity, duration, certainty, propinquity, fecundity, purity, extent Panopticon: circular prison where a guard can observe all without being seen — model of social control through surveillance Reform of legislation: laws must be calculated to maximize public utility Influenced by Hume — sentiments of pleasure/pain as criterion Helvétius — social happiness as the end of legislation Locke — empiricism Influenced John Stuart Mill — disciple who qualified utilitarianism Foucault — analysis of the Panopticon in Discipline and Punish Contemporary law and politics Works Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation (1789); writings on the Panopticon. ...

John Stuart Mill Born in London in 1806, John Stuart Mill was subjected by his father, James Mill, to an extraordinarily precocious and rigorous education — designed by Bentham’s circle to form a utilitarian thinker: he learned Greek at the age of three and devoured the classics and economics in childhood. At twenty he suffered a profound existential crisis, from which he recovered partly through Romantic poetry — an experience that led him to correct the arid utilitarianism in which he had been raised. He was also an economist, a Member of Parliament, and the intellectual companion of Harriet Taylor. He became the most influential liberal of the nineteenth century. ...

Karl Marx Born in Trier, in the Prussian Rhineland, in 1818, Karl Marx studied law and philosophy in Bonn and Berlin, where he drew close to the Young Hegelians. Barred from an academic career by his radical positions, he turned to journalism and, hounded by censorship, went into exile in Paris, Brussels, and finally London, where he lived through decades of poverty, sustained by his friend and collaborator Friedrich Engels and poring over the economists in the Reading Room of the British Museum. More than to interpret the world, he wanted to transform it: “the philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point, however, is to change it” (Thesis 11 on Feuerbach). ...

Ludwig Feuerbach German philosopher; dissident disciple of Hegel. His materialist and anthropological critique of religion was the fundamental link between Hegelian idealism and Marx’s historical materialism. He inverted Hegel by dissolving theology into anthropology: the real subject of philosophy is not the Spirit, but sensible man. Key Concepts Critique of religion as alienation: God does not create man — man creates God in his own image; religion is the projection of the finest human qualities (love, wisdom, power) onto a fictional being that is separate and superior. Man impoverishes himself in enriching God Anthropology as theology: theology must be dissolved into anthropology; the real subject of religion is man, not God. “Homo homini Deus” — man is the god of man Materialist sensualism: against Hegel’s idealism, reality begins in the sensible, in the corporeal, in the natural; consciousness is a function of matter, not the reverse Intersubjectivity: the “I” exists only in relation to the “thou”; human essence is fundamentally social and dialogical — precursor of personalism and the ethics of recognition Critique of Hegel: Absolute Spirit is mystification — it is real man abstracted and inverted; philosophy must descend from heaven to earth Influenced by Hegel — dialectics (but inverted: matter precedes spirit) Spinoza — monism and immanence Enlightenment sensualism (Condillac, La Mettrie) Influenced Marx — Theses on Feuerbach (1845): Marx surpasses Feuerbach; the critique of religious alienation must become a critique of material alienation Engels — dialectical materialism Bruno Bauer, Max Stirner — Young Hegelians Nineteenth-century humanistic atheism Works The Essence of Christianity (1841); Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843); The Essence of Religion (1845); Lectures on the Essence of Religion (1851). ...

Søren Kierkegaard Danish philosopher; the “father of existentialism”. Wrote frequently under pseudonyms to present opposing perspectives. His philosophy is a reaction to Hegel’s speculative system and the bourgeois comfort of institutional Christianity. Key Concepts Three stages of existence: Aesthetic: life oriented toward pleasure, novelty, aesthetics — the despair of inevitable boredom Ethical: commitment to duty, universal morality, marriage — the despair of unforgivable guilt Religious: suspension of the ethical by the singular before God — the “leap of faith” beyond reason Anxiety (Begrebet Angest, 1844): human freedom as “vertigo of possibility”; anxiety has no determinate object (unlike fear) — it is dizziness before the abyss of the possible Despair (The Sickness Unto Death, 1849): unwilling to be oneself, or willing to be other than oneself — the universal condition of humanity without relation to God Subjectivity (“Subjectivity is truth”): existential truth is not attained through Hegel’s objective speculation, but through subjective and passionate commitment Leap of faith: Abraham who goes to sacrifice Isaac — an act that suspends the ethical and makes sense only before the singular of God; Camus criticizes it as “philosophical suicide” Pseudonyms: Victor Eremita, Johannes Climacus, Anti-Climacus, Constantine Constantius — each represents a stage or perspective Influenced by Hegel — point of departure and principal adversary; rejects the speculative system Socrates — irony and indirect method; identified with him Plato — dialogues and Socratic position Luther — individual faith against institution Influenced Heidegger — anxiety, authenticity, being-toward-death Sartre — radical freedom, bad faith, existential project Camus — the absurd (but rejects Kierkegaard’s leap of faith) Simone de Beauvoir — concrete existential situation Existential theology (Karl Barth, Paul Tillich) Works Either/Or (1843); Fear and Trembling (1843); The Concept of Anxiety (1844); Stages on Life’s Way (1845); Philosophical Fragments (1844); The Sickness Unto Death (1849); The Point of View for My Work as an Author (1859, posthumous). ...

Vladímir Soloviov Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (28 January 1853, Moscow — 13 August 1900, the Uzkoye estate near Moscow) was a philosopher, theologian, poet, and critic — the first Russian thinker to build a comprehensive metaphysical system and the founder of the tradition of Russian religious philosophy. The son of the great historian Sergei Solovyov, he was a friend of Dostoevsky and a central figure in the intellectual life of his time. His work cast its shadow over the entire following generation — from Berdyaev and Bulgakov to Russian poetic Symbolism. ...

Wilhelm Dilthey Wilhelm Dilthey was born in Biebrich am Rhein (present-day Wiesbaden, Germany) on 19 November 1833 and died in Seis am Schlern (present-day northern Italy) on 1 October 1911. He held professorships in Basel, Kiel, and from 1882 in Berlin — where he occupied the chair once held by Hegel — and devoted his life to a project that remained unfinished yet profoundly influential: providing the human sciences (Geisteswissenschaften) with their own philosophical foundation, comparable to what Kant had given the natural sciences in the Critique of Pure Reason. ...