Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. He is known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism.
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was a German philosopher. He began his career as a classical philologist before turning to philosophy. He became the youngest person to hold the Chair of Classical Philology at the University of Basel in 1869 at the age of 24, but resigned in 1879 due to health problems that plagued him most of his life; he completed much of his core writing in the following decade. In 1889, at age 44, he suffered a collapse and afterward a complete loss of his mental faculties, with paralysis and probably vascular dementia. He lived his remaining years in the care of his mother until her death in 1897 and then with his sister Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche. Nietzsche died in 1900, after experiencing pneumonia and multiple strokes.
Pessimism is a mental attitude in which an undesirable outcome is anticipated from a given situation. Pessimists tend to focus on the negatives of life in general. A common question asked to test for pessimism is "Is the glass half empty or half full?"; in this situation, a pessimist is said to see the glass as half empty, or in extreme cases completely empty, while an optimist is said to see the glass as half full. Throughout history, the pessimistic disposition has had effects on all major areas of thinking.
"The Last Messiah" is a 1933 essay by the Norwegian philosopher Peter Wessel Zapffe. One of his most significant works, this approximately 10 pages long essay would later be expanded upon in Zapffe’s book, On the Tragic, and, as a theory describes a reinterpretation of Friedrich Nietzsche's Übermensch. Zapffe believed that existential crisis or angst in humanity was the result of an overly evolved intellect, and that people overcome this by "artificially limiting the content of consciousness."
Emil Mihai Cioran was a Romanian philosopher, aphorist and essayist, who published works in both Romanian and French. His work has been noted for its pervasive philosophical pessimism, style, and aphorisms. His works frequently engaged with issues of suffering, decay, and nihilism. In 1937, Cioran moved to the Latin Quarter of Paris, which became his permanent residence, wherein he lived in seclusion with his partner, Simone Boué, until his death in 1995.
Thomas Ligotti is an American horror writer. His writings are rooted in several literary genres – most prominently weird fiction – and have been described by critics as works of philosophical horror, often formed into short stories and novellas in the tradition of gothic fiction. The worldview espoused by Ligotti in his fiction and non-fiction has been described as pessimistic and nihilistic. The Washington Post called him "the best kept secret in contemporary horror fiction."
The philosophy of biology is a subfield of philosophy of science, which deals with epistemological, metaphysical, and ethical issues in the biological and biomedical sciences. Although philosophers of science and philosophers generally have long been interested in biology, philosophy of biology only emerged as an independent field of philosophy in the 1960s and 1970s, associated with the research of David Hull. Philosophers of science then began paying increasing attention to biology, from the rise of Neodarwinism in the 1930s and 1940s to the discovery of the structure of DNA in 1953 to more recent advances in genetic engineering. Other key ideas include the reduction of all life processes to biochemical reactions, and the incorporation of psychology into a broader neuroscience.
Alexander R. Galloway is an author and professor in the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He has a bachelor's degree in Modern Culture and Media from Brown University and earned a Ph.D. in literature from Duke University in 2001. Galloway is known for his writings on philosophy, media theory, contemporary art, film, and video games.
McKenzie Wark is an Australian-born writer and scholar. Wark is known for her writings on media theory, critical theory, new media, and the Situationist International. Her best known works are A Hacker Manifesto and Gamer Theory. She is a professor of Media and Cultural Studies at The New School.
Raymond Brassier is a British philosopher. He is member of the philosophy faculty at the American University of Beirut, Lebanon, known for his work in philosophical realism. He was formerly Research Fellow at the Centre for Research in Modern European Philosophy at Middlesex University, London, England.
Speculative realism is a movement in contemporary Continental-inspired philosophy that defines itself loosely in its stance of metaphysical realism against its interpretation of the dominant forms of post-Kantian philosophy.
Tariq Goddard is a British novelist and publisher. He has written seven novels, the first of which Homage to a Firing Squad, was short-listed for the Whitbread Book Award for First Novel. His first three novels were published by Sceptre. In 2007, he founded the independent publishing company, Zero Books, and is now the publisher of Repeater Books.
Dark media are a type of media outlined by American philosopher Eugene Thacker to describe technologies that mediate between the natural and supernatural, most commonly found in the horror genre.
Collective Ink Limited is a publishing company founded in the United Kingdom in 2001 under the name John Hunt Publishing and launched as O Books. The publisher has 15 active imprints, the largest of which are Moon Books, O-Books and Zero Books. The Zero Books imprint was founded to combat what they viewed as a trend of anti-intellectualism in contemporary culture. After changing ownership in 2021, in June 2023, John Hunt Publishing was renamed to Collective Ink.
The Conspiracy Against the Human Race: A Contrivance of Horror is a 2010 non-fiction book by American author Thomas Ligotti. Better known as a horror fiction author, with Conspiracy Ligotti offers a series of essays exploring his philosophical pessimism, nihilist and antinatalist views. Among other sources, Ligotti cites Peter Wessel Zapffe's essay "The Last Messiah" and the writings of Emil Cioran (1911–1995) and Philipp Mainländer (1841–1876) as inspirations for his philosophical outlook. The book is noted for its repeated usage of the phrase "malignantly useless," as well as for the manner "in which philosophical thought and literary analysis converge" in his writings. In 2018, the book was re-released, with a new preface.
Olga Marie Pauline Plümacher was a Russian-born Swiss-American philosopher and scholar. She engaged with the philosophies of the German philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Eduard von Hartmann, and published three books which contributed to the pessimism controversy in Germany. Her book on the history of philosophical pessimism, Der Pessimismus in Vergangenheit und Gegenwart was influential on Friedrich Nietzsche and Samuel Beckett.
The Human Predicament: A Candid Guide to Life's Biggest Questions is a philosophy book by David Benatar, which makes a case for philosophical pessimism, published by Oxford University Press in 2017. The book presents Benatar's views on a range of philosophical issues, arguing, among other topics, that having children is immoral, that death is bad despite much of human life being spent in suffering, and that suicide may be a morally justified action more often than is commonly assumed. The Human Predicament has been favorably compared to The Conspiracy Against the Human Race by Thomas Ligotti, the worldview presented in Ecclesiastes, and the works of philosopher Thomas Metzinger.
Philosophical pessimism is a family of philosophical views that assign a negative value to life or existence. Philosophical pessimists commonly argue that the world contains an empirical prevalence of pains over pleasures, that existence is ontologically or metaphysically adverse to living beings, and that life is fundamentally meaningless or without purpose. Philosophical pessimism is not a single coherent movement, but rather a loosely associated group of thinkers with similar ideas and a resemblance to each other. Their responses to the condition of life are widely varied. Philosophical pessimists usually do not advocate for suicide as a solution to the human predicament; though many favour the adoption of antinatalism, that is, non-procreation.
Philosophical pessimism is a philosophical school critical of existence.
