Chapters summary
Chapter 1: The Unsentimental Sentiment Every man in a culture has three levels of conscious reflection: his specific ideas about things, his general beliefs, and his metaphysical dream. The first constitutes his worldliness, the second is applied to certain choices as they present themselves and the third which is the most important is his intuitive feeling about the immanent nature of reality. Without this it is impossible to live together harmoniously for prolonged amounts of time. It is also his attitude toward the world and is the most important fact about a person.
Logic depends upon this dream, for the waning of the dream results in the confusion of counsel. Today many think that it does not matter what a man believes, but it does. What a man believes tells him what the world is for. If people can’t agree what the world is for, they can never agree on all the little things in life either. People don’t want others to take what they believe too seriously. This is how religion is currently viewed. Our various thoughts and assumptions about ideas are what give them meaning. Our ideas must be harmonized by some vision. Our task is to find that harmonization.
Chapter 2: Distinction and Hierarchy The most ominous event of our time is that people are steadily doing away with the distinctions which themselves create society. The preservation of society is directly linked with the recovery of knowledge. Society has structure and hierarchy which is determined by distinctions. People are becoming more and more overcome with the idea that in a just society there are no distinctions and everyone is equal. But people are engaged in self-promotion, contradicting that there are no distinctions. How can there be equality between sexes and ages? The basis of an organic society is a fraternity which unites parts that are distinct. Democracy presumes hierarchy and discrimination. Authority goes to knowledge.
Chapter 3: Fragmentation and Obsession Our culture has lost many values and those who want to restore those values are often told that they are trying to regress or turn back the hands of time. Values though are not affected by time and thus can be re-attained through the right process. In looking for values we are looking for truth. We have lost sight of true knowledge. Our leaders have come in three stages. The first was the philosophic doctor. He was the best, for he was the possessor of the highest learning. At the point of this ruler there was a great interest in Humanities and Liberal arts. Next came the gentleman. He was the second best. He was an Idealist with self- restraint . His only shortcoming was that he had lost sight of the spiritual origin of self-discipline. In this time ideals existed and Ideals are of supreme importance. Last and worst was the specialist. He ignored all circles of knowledge except a particular field in which he immersed himself. In this time men are lost without their particular fields of experience. Men are partially developed which means essentially that they are deformed. Deformed people are the last one who should be rulers. Fact has taken the place of truth. Authority is flawed and not to be trusted.
Chapter 4: Egotism in Work and Art Egotism is making one’s self the measure of value. One such man does not need to obey the laws of other men and can do what he will with his life. This sort of thinking leads inevitably into selfishness. Plato said that such a man would judge himself wrongly and choose his own interest over the truth. To the medieval man the path of learning was a path of self-deprecation; and knowledge prepared the way for self-effacement. The basis for internal pride is the seeking of a sort of salvation through knowledge. There is no necessity in the absence of truth. One type of fidelity is realizing an ideal. According to an egotistic mindset, the less communal programs in order to ensure self-inspired demands, the better. When divine laws are ignored and everything is seen to be man’s contrivance, the egotistic man will try to claw his way to the top of society. Some seek this sort of salvation through forms and so escape responsibilities. When disciplines are disregarded he tries to avoid responsibilities by claiming some sort of "progress". The failure to maintain internal discipline in a leader is followed by a rationalized single powerful will.
Chapter 5: The Great Stereopticon Those below the level of philosophy are ones to make the first effort to repair the damage. But their efforts have no effect because they attempt the repair by a physical means. Disintegration brings about, for our leaders, a problem of how to persuade to communal activity people who no longer have the same ideas about the most fundamental things. There can be no reconciliation between authority and individual will. The solution these leaders chose was to replace religion with education which was a systematic indoctrination through channels of information and entertainment. In comes the Great Stereopticon. This machine serves the function of projecting selected pictures of life in the hope that they will be imitated. It is today a machine of three parts, having been progressively improved. The three parts are: The Press, The Motion Picture, and The Radio. It is an ideal servant of progress. The problem with this machine is that the data it gives takes its significance from a sickly metaphysical dream. The ultimate source of evaluation becomes the dream of psychopathic, fragmentation, disharmony, and nonbeing. "The Great Stereopticon keeps the ordinary citizen from perceiving ’the vanity of his bookkeeping and the emptiness of his domestic felicities.’"
Chapter 6: The Spoiled-Child Psychology The author realizes, "HAVING been taught for four centuries, more or less, that his redemption lies through the conquest of nature, man expects his heaven to be spatial and temporal, and, beholding all things through the Great Stereopticon, he expects redemption to be easy of attainment. Only by these facts can we explain the spoiled-child psychology of the urban masses." The author notes, "[H]e has received concessions at enough points to think that he may obtain what he wishes through complaints and demands." And concerning the determinant confrontation with the Soviet Ease, the author writes, "Thus a great decision confronting the West in the future is how to overcome the spoiled-child psychology sufficiently to discipline for struggle." And he concludes, "In the final analysis this society is like the spoiled child in its incapacity to think. Anyone can observe in the pampered children of the rich a kind of irresponsibility of the mental process."
Chapter 7: The Last Metaphysical Right This chapter, and those following, is about means of restoration, i.e., remedies. "A primary object of those who wish to restore society is the demassing of the masses, and in this the role of property is paramount." The author explains the title, "We say the right of private property is metaphysical because it does not depend on any test of social usefulness." And then he warns against the gravity of the situation, "It is not a little disquieting to realize that in private property there survives the last domain of privacy of any kind." And if we choose to know and will, then "The moral solution is the distributive ownership of small properties. These take the form of independent farms, of local businesses, of homes owned by the occupants, where individual responsibility gives significance to prerogative over property. Such ownership provides a range of volition through which one can be a complete person, and it is the abridgment of this volition for which monopoly capitalism must be condemned along with communism."
Chapter 8: The Power of the Word The author introduces the message of the chapter by a reference to Saint John. He writes, "The central teaching of the New Testament is that those who accept the word acquire wisdom". The main argument here is the critique of modern semanticists. He observes, "In recognizing that words have power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation." And then he goes on to identify two dangerous phenomena: The attack upon the symbolic operations of language and the decay of honorifics (in forms of address!) The author declares that he is "ready to assert that we can never break out of the circle of language and seize the object barehanded, as it were, or without some ideational operation." Which is why "It is difficult, therefore, to overrate the importance of skill in language." And, "Poetry offers the fairest hope of restoring our lost unity of mind." In conclusion, the author suggests, "Since man necessarily uses both the poetical and the logical resources of speech, he needs a twofold training. The first part must be devoted to literature and rhetoric, the second to logic and dialectic."
Chapter 9: Piety and Justice "Piety is a discipline of the will through respect. It admits the right to exist of things larger than the ego, of things different from the ego. And, before we can bring harmony back […] we shall have to regard with the spirit of piety three things: nature, our neighbors—by which I mean all other people—and the past." Regarding nature, the author warns, "Triumphs against the natural order of living exact unforeseen payments… Our planet is falling victim to a rigorism, so that what is done in any remote corner affects—nay, menaces—the whole. Resiliency and tolerance are lost." Regarding neighbors, "Knowledge disciplines egotism so that one credits the reality of other selves… But to have enough imagination to see into other lives and enough piety to realize that their existence is a part of beneficent creation is the very foundation of human community." And regarding the past, "in so far as we are creatures of reflection, we have only the past… Awareness of the past is an antidote to both egotism and shallow optimism." Toward the conclusion, and concerning women, the author affirms, "once again equality destroys fraternity". Restoration comes at a price, "Yet it is the duty of those who can foresee the end of a saturnalia to make their counsel known."
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding is a book by the Scottish empiricist philosopher David Hume, published in English in 1748. It was a revision of an earlier effort, Hume's A Treatise of Human Nature, published anonymously in London in 1739–40. Hume was disappointed with the reception of the Treatise, which "fell dead-born from the press," as he put it, and so tried again to disseminate his more developed ideas to the public by writing a shorter and more polemical work.
Epistemology is the branch of philosophy concerned with knowledge. Epistemologists study the nature, origin, and scope of knowledge, epistemic justification, the rationality of belief, and various related issues. Debates in (contemporary) epistemology are generally clustered around four core areas:
- The philosophical analysis of the nature of knowledge and the conditions required for a belief to constitute knowledge, such as truth and justification
- Potential sources of knowledge and justified belief, such as perception, reason, memory, and testimony
- The structure of a body of knowledge or justified belief, including whether all justified beliefs must be derived from justified foundational beliefs or whether justification requires only a coherent set of beliefs
- Philosophical skepticism, which questions the possibility of knowledge, and related problems, such as whether skepticism poses a threat to our ordinary knowledge claims and whether it is possible to refute skeptical arguments
The problem of universals is an ancient question from metaphysics that has inspired a range of philosophical topics and disputes: "Should the properties an object has in common with other objects, such as color and shape, be considered to exist beyond those objects? And if a property exists separately from objects, what is the nature of that existence?"
Substance theory, or substance–attribute theory, is an ontological theory positing that objects are constituted each by a substance and properties borne by the substance but distinct from it. In this role, a substance can be referred to as a substratum or a thing-in-itself. Substances are particulars that are ontologically independent: they are able to exist all by themselves. Another defining feature often attributed to substances is their ability to undergo changes. Changes involve something existing before, during and after the change. They can be described in terms of a persisting substance gaining or losing properties. Attributes or properties, on the other hand, are entities that can be exemplified by substances. Properties characterize their bearers; they express what their bearer is like.
The Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus is the only book-length philosophical work by the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein that was published during his lifetime. The project had a broad goal: to identify the relationship between language and reality and to define the limits of science. Wittgenstein wrote the notes for the Tractatus while he was a soldier during World War I and completed it during a military leave in the summer of 1918. It was originally published in German in 1921 as Logisch-Philosophische Abhandlung. In 1922 it was published together with an English translation and a Latin title, which was suggested by G. E. Moore as homage to Baruch Spinoza's Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670).
Relativism is a family of philosophical views which deny claims to objectivity within a particular domain and assert that valuations in that domain are relative to the perspective of an observer or the context in which they are assessed. There are many different forms of relativism, with a great deal of variation in scope and differing degrees of controversy among them. Moral relativism encompasses the differences in moral judgments among people and cultures. Epistemic relativism holds that there are no absolute principles regarding normative belief, justification, or rationality, and that there are only relative ones. Alethic relativism is the doctrine that there are no absolute truths, i.e., that truth is always relative to some particular frame of reference, such as a language or a culture. Some forms of relativism also bear a resemblance to philosophical skepticism. Descriptive relativism seeks to describe the differences among cultures and people without evaluation, while normative relativism evaluates the word truthfulness of views within a given framework.
In philosophy, rationalism is the epistemological view that "regards reason as the chief source and test of knowledge" or "any view appealing to reason as a source of knowledge or justification", often in contrast to other possible sources of knowledge such as faith, tradition, or sensory experience. More formally, rationalism is defined as a methodology or a theory "in which the criterion of truth is not sensory but intellectual and deductive".
William James was an American philosopher, psychologist, and the first educator to offer a psychology course in the United States. James is considered to be a leading thinker of the late 19th century, one of the most influential philosophers of the United States, and the "Father of American psychology."
Nicolas Malebranche was a French Oratorian Catholic priest and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world. Malebranche is best known for his doctrines of vision in God, occasionalism and ontologism.
Meditations on First Philosophy, in which the existence of God and the immortality of the soul are demonstrated is a philosophical treatise by René Descartes first published in Latin in 1641. The French translation was published in 1647 as Méditations Métaphysiques. The title may contain a misreading by the printer, mistaking animae immortalitas for animae immaterialitas, as suspected by A. Baillet.
The Critique of Pure Reason is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, in which the author seeks to determine the limits and scope of metaphysics. Also referred to as Kant's "First Critique", it was followed by his Critique of Practical Reason (1788) and Critique of Judgment (1790). In the preface to the first edition, Kant explains that by a "critique of pure reason" he means a critique "of the faculty of reason in general, in respect of all knowledge after which it may strive independently of all experience" and that he aims to reach a decision about "the possibility or impossibility of metaphysics". The term "critique" is understood to mean a systematic analysis in this context, rather than the colloquial sense of the term.
Transcendental idealism is a philosophical system founded by German philosopher Immanuel Kant in the 18th century. Kant's epistemological program is found throughout his Critique of Pure Reason (1781). By transcendental Kant means that his philosophical approach to knowledge transcends mere consideration of sensory evidence and requires an understanding of the mind's innate modes of processing that sensory evidence.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding is a work by John Locke concerning the foundation of human knowledge and understanding. It first appeared in 1689 with the printed title An Essay Concerning Humane Understanding. He describes the mind at birth as a blank slate filled later through experience. The essay was one of the principal sources of empiricism in modern philosophy, and influenced many enlightenment philosophers, such as David Hume and George Berkeley.
Ferdinand Canning Scott Schiller, FBA, usually cited as F. C. S. Schiller, was a German-British philosopher. Born in Altona, Holstein, Schiller studied at the University of Oxford, later was a professor there, after being invited back after a brief time at Cornell University. Later in his life he taught at the University of Southern California. In his lifetime he was well known as a philosopher; after his death, his work was largely forgotten.
Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics That Will Be Able to Present Itself as a Science is a book by the German philosopher Immanuel Kant, published in 1783, two years after the first edition of his Critique of Pure Reason. One of Kant's shorter works, it contains a summary of the Critique‘s main conclusions, sometimes by arguments Kant had not used in the Critique. Kant characterizes his more accessible approach here as an "analytic" one, as opposed to the Critique‘s "synthetic" examination of successive faculties of the mind and their principles.
Concluding Unscientific Postscript to the Philosophical Fragments is a major work by Søren Kierkegaard. The work is an attack against Hegelianism, the philosophy of Hegel, and especially Hegel's Science of Logic. The work is also famous for its dictum, Subjectivity is Truth. It was an attack on what Kierkegaard saw as Hegel's deterministic philosophy. Against Hegel's system, Kierkegaard is often interpreted as taking the side of metaphysical libertarianism or free will, though it has been argued that an incompatibilist conception of free will is not essential to Kierkegaard's formulation of existentialism.
The Philosophy of Freedom is the fundamental philosophical work of philosopher, Goethe scholar and esotericist Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925). It addresses the question of whether and in what sense human beings are free. Originally published in 1894 in German as Die Philosophie der Freiheit, with a second edition published in 1918, the work has appeared under a number of English titles, including The Philosophy of Spiritual Activity, The Philosophy of Freedom, and Intuitive Thinking as a Spiritual Path.
The analytic–synthetic distinction is a semantic distinction used primarily in philosophy to distinguish between propositions that are of two types: analytic propositions and synthetic propositions. Analytic propositions are true or not true solely by virtue of their meaning, whereas synthetic propositions' truth, if any, derives from how their meaning relates to the world.
Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity is a 1989 book by the American philosopher Richard Rorty, based on two sets of lectures he gave at University College, London, and at Trinity College, Cambridge. In contrast to his earlier work, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (1979), Rorty mostly abandons attempts to explain his theories in analytical terms and instead creates an alternate conceptual schema to that of the "Platonists" he rejects. In this schema "truth" is considered unintelligible and meaningless.
The Self Awakened: Pragmatism Unbound is a 2007 book by philosopher and politician Roberto Mangabeira Unger. In the book, Unger sets forth a theory of human nature, a philosophical view of time, nature and reality, and a proposal for changes to social and political institutions so that they best nourish the context-transcending quality that Unger sees at the core of human existence. Written in a prophetic and poetic manner that drew comparison with the work of Whitman and Emerson, and delving into issues of humankind's existential predicament in a manner that one critic found evocative of Sartre, The Self Awakened also serves as a summation of many of the core principles of Unger's work.
