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Key Philosophers: A Quick Summary |
A couple of quick notes about Plato and Aristotle...
Plato:
Plato wrote to answer two questions:
Virtue = the correct knowledge of things. Can be taught
Five cardinal qualities of good: bravery, temperance, piety, wisdom and justice.
Aristotle:
Post-Greek Philosophers:
Peter Abelard: (p. 38) He focuses on the intention of the moral agent and held that intention determined morality. (I was trying to help...didn't mean to..etc.) Fell in love with 17 year old he was tutoring. She became pregnant He was surprised in his sleep by her father's henchmen and castrated. He fled to monastery, she was sent to a convent. He was never happy after that, and not well received in the several monasteries where he lived and worked.
St. Thomas Aquinas: p.40 He decided to become a friar (1225-1274) rather than a monk. Friars were very poor, whereas monks lived fairly well. His family was furious, but he wanted to serve. His family kidnapped him and locked him in their castle for more than year. He studied Aristotle and the scriptures. When they sent a beautiful and willing young woman up to him, he drove her from the room with a firebrand. He tried never ever to look at woman again and avoided them.
His philosophy is described by Leslie as "a Christian view of ethics." If properly applied, ethics will lead one to a good life and happiness. Some things were inherently good (prudence, justice, temperance and courage) and others were evil if they were selfish or diminished the cardinal virtues.
Francis Bacon: p.44 1561-1626 He was a contemporary of Queen Elizabeth I and her successor, advising both and serving in various positions in the government.
While respected as a major philosopher, he didn't practice what he preached. He believed that if people studied and learned, they would discover what was good and then do it. He believed each person had six human powers: understanding, reason, imagination, memory, appetite, and will. Humans could use these powers to acquire knowledge and act in the right way. Understanding and reason are logical powers, but appetite and will have to do with our emotional side. Bacon thought that ethical behavior would be guided by reason which would control our appetites. Unfortunately, Bacon, accepted bribes while in office and was exiled from Parliament and other official duties. One of his contemporaries, while calling him a genius, and a man who was good company, described Bacon as man who was "a pleaser of men." That can be a deadly flaw.
Niccolo Machiavelli: (1466-1527) p. 48 This is one of the "bad guy" philosophers. His famous work, The Prince, is all about how to obtain and maintain power, and it's a "do what ever is necessary" strategy. He worked in government affairs in Italy and learned that if he wanted to be a political success, he could not procrastinate, he had to appear decisive, and take bold action..
Machiavelli believed that mercy, faith, integrity, and humanity were virtues we should have, but that are often impractical for the politician. There could also be a difference between one's political and private life and the applicable ethics. Some key points in his philosophy:
Machiavelli was the supreme pragmatist: do what you have to do to get what you want. If that meant that "virtue" was "flexible," so be it.
Thomas Hobbes: p. 53 (1588-1679) He knew many of the great minds of his day, though he came from a poor background. He read and spoke five languages and worked for the nobility of England of the time.
Hobbes is the first noted moral relativist. He believed he was applying scientific and mathematical methods to the study of human beings, and when it came to ethical stability, he found it in the state. He believed that a strong state (something he didn't have in much of his life due to turmoil in England) allowed people the security to spend their time scientifically studying moral behavior. He had five key ideas as a basis of his work:
You can find these ideas in Hobbes work, Leviathan, his major work. He believed people should follow moral principles if they could, and established the following:
[The rebels....]
Francois Marie Arouet Voltaire: p. 56 (1694-1778) Born in Paris, Voltaire moved in aristocratic company. People noted him for his intelligence and wit, and he became one of the most important thinkers of the Enlightenment, or the Age of Reason. It was this time in France of the 1700s that music, art, science, philosophy all developed at an astounding rate, and humans entered what we call the modern period. Voltaire was a deist. He believed that God existed, but that he basically had a hands-off policy after creation, and that people could come to know God through reason. The church and other religious institutions just got in the way.
Jean Jacque Rousseau: p. 59 (1712-1778) Another Frenchman, Voltaire and Rousseau were contemporaries. His mother died shortly after his birth, and his father was mostly gone from the home. Rousseau was raised by an aunt who did take good care of him, but his father's absence and emotionalism when home left a mark. He was sent away at age 12 to be educated by a pastor whose sister frequently spanked him and he was miserable. He withdrew. His next education came at the tutelage of Madame Warrens, in whose home came to spend more and more time. She was attractive, young (though 12 years older than he) and after some time, invited him to her bed. She was a woman of rather extensive and unusual experience, and the teenaged Rousseau was attracted and confused as he was drawn into the affair. Rousseau later worked as a tutor, interpreter, and secretary to the French ambassador. In 1742 while in Paris, he began an affair with Therese Levasseur. He had five children with her in rapid succession and gave all of them away to orphanages (NOT nice places in that day...) That added to his guilt. While he became successful as a thinker and writer, but was publicly humiliated when Rousseau who exposed him as a man who had abandoned his children. He moved in with Lavasseur shortly before his death in 1778.
This complicated man's philosophy was extremely important to the political thought which led to our revolution. He was a political theorist. His greatest work is the Social Contract. In this work he lays out some key concepts:
[The traditionalists]
Benedict Spinoza p. 68 (1632-1677) Spinoza was of Spanish/Portuguese Jewish descent but was raised in Holland to which his parents had fled. As he studied the philosophers, he began to have questions about his Jewish faith, and was excommunicated at age 24 (after the Jewish community had tried diligently to bring him back into the fold). He changed his name from Baruch to Benedict and learned how to grind lenses for glasses to support himself. He worked during the day and studied at night and lived a simple life with little luxury. When offered a chair of philosophy at a university, he declined it, due to poor health. The glass dust had caused respiratory problems.
His book is Ethics, written in Latin, in the form of mathematical theorems, and it is not an easy read. Spinoza holds that there are three fundamental aspects of life and nature:
As a result of those three premises, Spinoza held that
Spinoza advised people to form their own code of morality and use it every day.
Immanuel Kant: p.72 (1724-1804) Kant was born in Prussia and never traveled more than 40 miles from his birthplace. Born into a modest family with nine children, he was sick as child. His home life modeled hard work and honesty, and though his mother died when he was young, he credits her with teaching him the importance of goodness. His family was deeply faithful and his childhood was one of peace and family security, though illness took several brothers and sisters as well as his mother. He began school when he was eight and studied without vacation from 7 a.m. till 4 p.m. and took additional classes on Saturday. He graduated with honors, went to university, received his degree and eventually taught there. He taught an exhausting schedule and wrote.
His major work was Critique of Pure Reason. He valued moral integrity and intelligence and his life reflected both values. Kant was fascinated with developing science, but was concerned for the philosophical changes it suggested. He was concerned that if scientific determinism became the justification for all understanding, then freedom and morality would disappear. Why? Because if we are "determined" by the physical, then we are what we are and can be no more or better. The poor are born to be poor, etc.
Kant suggested a system based on the categorical imperative : individuals should act as though what they did would be come the law of nature. Everyone else would act as you do. That means that you, too, would have to accept the consequences of the action you plan to take. Kant is a consequentialist. The categorical imperative is based on the following concepts:
Following the categorical imperative is dependent upon some other premises. Before we act, we must consider the following:
Kant believed that there was a distinct difference between things and people. People had intrinsic worth because they were created in the image of God. Things could be good, but had no intrinsic worth.
Kant wanted to find a system of 'maxims' -- or plans of action -- that were a perfect set of rules which would lead people and societies to a system which was moral.
John Stuart Mill: p. 79 (1806-1873) Born in London to an intellectual father disappointed in his less-than-intellectual wife and a mother who felt neglected by her husband. His father taught him as a toddler to suppress all emotion. Intellect was everything. His childhood was a nightmare. He could read English by age two and Greek by age three. By ten he had to have mastered English history and literature, as well as philosophy. His father still wasn't happy and pushed him harder. At 13 he learned calculus, geometry, algebra, logic and Latin, and then was forced to begin teaching his younger siblings. Was devoted to his father, and didn't seem to be terribly unhappy. During long walks with his father, his dad would teach him additional information and John would be expected to have written it all down by the next morning. Mill wrote that his father never allowed him to cram...he had to truly understand.
Utilitarianism changed Mill's focus. Jeremy Bentham's philosophy of "the greatest good for the greatest number". He was at a point of mental exhaustion, worrying about things over which no one has control, and he went into deep depression. When he came out of the depression, another event shook him to the core. He met a married woman, Harriet Taylor, in 1830. She was smart enjoyed talking with Mill about philosophy and other issues for which her husband had no interest. They became friends. When the Taylors separated, Mill and Harriet spent more time together, much to the consternation of Mill's father. But Mill insisted it was just a friendship but when John Taylor died, they married. They had been close friends for 21 years, but were married only two. Harriet passed away in 1858, two years after their wedding.
Mill's promoted the philosophy of utilitarianism and he applied that philosophy to political reform. He believed:
There are two classifications of utilitarians:
Mill took it a step further: Philosophical Utilitarianism = the good or well-being of others is the only ethical good.
Arthur Schopenhauer: p. 88 (1788-1860) Born into a happy family, this German philosopher was affected by the unsettled nature of Europe during his life. He valued character and patience, but was known to have a temper and he liked to be left alone. He was fastidious and neat, disliked women but kept company with them occasionally. He was an educator and scholar, widely travelled and well read -- in many languages. His life was regimented and orderly, though he was to become crabby and cynical and "great pessimist" became his nickname.
His theory had three foundation blocks: will, character and happiness (or pleasure). Will was the most important and is the controlling factor, though character plays a part. Pleasure is only the absence of pain. He believed that human will is not free, nor is character anything which can be changed. People are what they are, but morality can be developed from
Schopenhauer didn't manage application of his philosophy to his own life very well.
Emile Durkheim: p. 94 (1858-1917) Durkheim was born into a happy, close-knit Jewish family and was expected to become a rabbi. One of his teachers was a Catholic woman and he came out of his experience with her an agnostic. He remained so the rest of his life. He loved the academic life, but failed to get into the school he wanted after two tries. He eventually was admitted but then disliked the study of Latin and Greek and the rigidity of the structure. Still his teachers liked him, he had lots of friends and graduated to teach philosophy in schools near Paris. He married, had two children, and a happy family life. World War I affected him deeply, largely because he saw so many of his students perish in the war, and one of them was his son. He was the father of modern sociology and produced a large body of work, but many of his papers were lost during W.W. II.
He is a social philosopher. He believed in the application of scientific method to ethical study in his early work, but abandoned that concept. That approach was called scientific naturalism, but Durkheim abandoned it. He believed that morality came from the society in which it is practiced and that ethics can't be separated. He was concerned that the old ways of gemienschaft were being replaced by a contract-based gezellschaft society, and in the process, the moral ideals or standards of the society were being lost.
Jean-Paul Sartre: p. 102 (1905-1980) Another philosopher who had a difficult childhood, Sartre may have had the strangest of all. Though a boy, he was treated as girl, and he never had contact with his father who died when he was very little. When his father died, he and his mother moved back with her father. They were forced to stay in the same room and treated more as siblings than daughter and grandson. He was spoiled by his mother and grandmother, but his grandfather was strict and demanding. It was a confusing and frustrating. When he faked reading a book and memorized what his mother read, his grandfather pronounced that he would become a great thinker. Leslie writes that "he faked much of his childhood trying to please adults who controlled him." (p. 104) Then he failed his first test in school....In 1917 his mother remarried, and now his mother was his mother again. He resented his mother's remarriage and everything about his stepfather. He did poorly in school and was miserable at home. He didn't know how to relate to anyone and was known for lying. In 1924, he began the study of philosophy and began to do well. He also met Simone de Beauvoir, a student who shared his interests. While they never married, their relationship lasted 51 years. It was a one-sided relationship. She was devoted to him, but he mistreated her badly. He was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature, but refused to accept it. His life was one of selfishness and decadence. When he died he left all he had to a mistress he had begun seeing when she was only 17. Beauvoir received nothing.
Sartre established the concept of existentialism. It is a philosophy which opposes the idea that the universe is rational or intelligible to a rational observer who can discover the natural laws which govern it. No person has a purpose or a specific place, there is no order, no plan, and that because reason is not going to offer any answers, we each have to take responsibility for what we do. Sartre held that
Ayn Rand: p. 109 (1905-1982)
Born in Russia, Ayn (rhymes with MINE) immigrated to America as teenager, leaving her parents and family behind never to see them again. She stayed for a time in Chicago and then went on to California where she met C.B. DeMille. She later met Frank O'Connor with whom she fell in love. She worked in the movie business, writing, in wardrobe, and doing other odd jobs, writing in the evenings. The Fountainhead was her first success. Atlas Shrugged was the second great novel, but it was finished after a deep bout of depression brought about by an affair.
Rand established a philosophy she called objectivism. She considered herself a modern rationalist, but disliked modern philosophers. She especially disliked Kant, who believed that duty was a moral action. Her objective philosophy was one of self interest. She believed that man was an heroic being, with happiness being is only moral purpose, productive achievement the best activity, and reason being the only absolute. All of this is dependent upon man's ability to use senses to discern objective reality and construct a moral code that makes him happy. That code forms the standard on which ethical decisions are made. She acknowledged that hers was a selfish philosophy and supported radical capitalism as a way to achieve personal goals.
Lawrence Kohlberg: p. 115 (192-1987) American by birth and phsychology professor by profession, Kohlberg developed a theory of moral development. His theory is based on four assumptions;
Out of those assumptions came the stages:
When faced with competing moral obligations or "goods" one will decide based on which stage of ethical development one has completed.
Judeo-Christian Tradition: p. 119
Postmodern Approaches:
Michel Foucault: p. 128 (1926- ) Michel was another philosopher with a troubled child hood, and attempted suicide a number of times during school. A psychologist determined the problem was Michel's difficulty accepting his homosexuality. He joined the Communist party in 1950. He spent his life as a philosophy professor in France, visiting America in the 1980s. He wrote about the treatment of the mentally ill, the prison systems, and power relationships associated with sexuality. Later in his life, he focused on more philosophical and ethical issues. He believed that people needed to consider:
Jean Baudrillard: p. 133 ( 1929- ) Considered the "high priest of post-modernism, a French philosopher, he spent his life teaching, but he wasn't very good at it. He wrote and traveled a great deal, including to the U.S.
His philosophy held the following points:
But while he criticized consumerism, the man had 50 TV sets in his home.......
Leslie, Larry. Mass Communication Ethics: Decision in Postmodern Culture. Houghton Mifflin Co.: Boston, 2000.