From Rationalism to Existentialism

From Rationalism to Existentialism
Author: Robert C. Solomon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 368
Release: 2001
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780742512412

In this enduring text, renowned philosopher Robert C. Solomon provides students with a detailed introduction to modern existentialism. He reveals how this philosophy not only connects with, but derives from, the thought of traditional philosophers through the works of Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. Thus, existentialism emerges from the school of rational thought as a logical evolution of respected philosophy.

Existential Rationalism

Existential Rationalism
Author: Marcel Eschauzier
Publisher: Xrlmedia
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2024-07-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN:

Ideas can change the world but rarely do. Some call for pause. What if Western thought is warped by an illusion so compelling that it affects almost every aspect of our understanding, including modern science? Scientists look for objective knowledge. But suppose the distinction between the subjective mind and the objective reality does not exist. Fathoming this is called nondual awareness, and it is so counterintuitive that it remains rare. Nonetheless, reason demands a nondual world, as Existential Rationalism explains. This has far-reaching consequences. For example, science relies heavily on replicable experiments. But without an objective reality, what makes empirical data scientific? To answer this question, Eschauzier goes back nearly three centuries when David Hume made his case for empiricism, challenging the validity of pure reason to obtain scientific knowledge. Rationalism never recovered from Hume's challenge. Eschauzier argues that nondual awareness is the missing insight to reinstate reason as the supreme scientific principle: Without an objective reality, reason justifies empirical science. Thus revitalized, the principles of rational thought can still provide groundbreaking clarity today. From understanding the dualistic disposition in psychology to debunking the quantum computer mythology, Existential Rationalism is a trailblazing synthesis of Western rationalism and Eastern nondualism. "I am a firm believer that great things happen when different practices and schools of thought converge to create something new. Arts and hard sciences are often pitted against each other as contradictory and opposite ends of our spectrum of knowledge. This book is a wonderful example of how philosophy and science can be integrated to deepen our understanding of both. [...] Kudos to the author for this inspiring contribution to the world!"-Amazon customer

The Existentialists

The Existentialists
Author: Charles B. Guignon
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 198
Release: 2004
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780742514133

This volume brings together for the first time some of the most helpful and insightful essays on the four most influential and discussed philosophers in the history of existentialism: Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The contributors write on such topics as Kierkegaard's knight of faith and his diagnosis of the 'present age;' Nietzsche's view of morality and self-creation; Heidegger's accounts of worldhood and authenticity; and Sartre's ontology, ethics, and conception of the cogito. The essays have been selected for their higher level of scholarship and for their ability to illuminate various aspects of their subject's work. The volume is enhanced by the editor's introduction and extensive bibliography to aid further study.

Irrational Man

Irrational Man
Author: William Barrett
Publisher: Anchor
Total Pages: 321
Release: 2011-01-26
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0307761088

Widely recognized as the finest definition of existentialist philosophy ever written, this book introduced existentialism to America in 1958. Barrett speaks eloquently and directly to concerns of the 1990s: a period when the irrational and the absurd are no better integrated than before and when humankind is in even greater danger of destroying its existence without ever understanding the meaning of its existence. Irrational Man begins by discussing the roots of existentialism in the art and thinking of Augustine, Aquinas, Pascal, Baudelaire, Blake, Dostoevski, Tolstoy, Hemingway, Picasso, Joyce, and Beckett. The heart of the book explains the views of the foremost existentialists—Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Sartre. The result is a marvelously lucid definition of existentialism and a brilliant interpretation of its impact.

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology
Author: Knox Peden
Publisher: Stanford University Press
Total Pages: 381
Release: 2014-06-04
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0804791368

Spinoza Contra Phenomenology fundamentally recasts the history of postwar French thought, typically presumed to have been driven by a critique of reason indebted to Nietzsche and Heidegger. Although the reception of phenomenology gave rise to many innovative developments in French philosophy, from existentialism to deconstruction, not everyone in France was pleased with this German import. This book recounts how a series of French philosophers used Spinoza to erect a bulwark against the nominally irrationalist tendencies of phenomenology. From its beginnings in the interwar years, this rationalism would prove foundational for Althusser's rethinking of Marxism and Deleuze's ambitious metaphysics. There has been a renewed enthusiasm for Spinozism of late by those who see his work as a kind of neo-vitalism or philosophy of life and affect. Peden counters this trend by tracking a decisive and neglected aspect of Spinoza's philosophy—his rationalism—in a body of thought too often presumed to have rejected reason. In the process, he demonstrates that the virtues of Spinoza's rationalism have yet to be exhausted.

Dictionary of Existentialism

Dictionary of Existentialism
Author: Haim Gordon
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 552
Release: 2013-10-31
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1135947945

Existentialism, as a philosophy, gained prominence after World War II. Instead of focusing upon a particular aspect of human existence, existentialists argued that our focus must be upon the whole being as he/she exists in the world. Rebelling against the rationalism of such philosophers as Descartes and Hegel, existentialists reject the emphasis placed on man as primarily a thinking being. Freedom is central to human existence, and human relations and encounters cannot be reduced simply to "thinking." This Dictionary provides--through alphabetically arranged entries--overviews of the various tenets, philosophers, and writers of existentialism, and of those writers/philosophers who, in retrospect, seem to existentialists to espouse their philosophy: Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Dostoyevski, et al.

Post-Rationalism

Post-Rationalism
Author: Tom Eyers
Publisher: A&C Black
Total Pages: 342
Release: 2013-05-09
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1441149759

Post-Rationalism takes the experimental journal of psychoanalysis and philosophy, Cahiers pour l'Analyse, as its main source. Established by students of Louis Althusser in 1966, the journal has rarely figured in the literature, although it contained the first published work of authors now famous in contemporary critical thought, including Alain Badiou, Jean-Claude Milner, Luce Irigaray, André Green and Jacques-Alain Miller. The Cahiers served as a testing ground for the combination of diverse intellectual sources indicative of the period, including the influential reinvention of Freud and Marx undertaken by Lacan and Althusser, and the earlier post-rationalist philosophy of science pioneered by Gaston Bachelard, Georges Canguilhem and Alexandre Koyré. This book is a wide-ranging analysis of the intellectual foundations of structuralism, re-connecting the work of young post-Lacanian and post-Althusserian theorists with their predecessors in French philosophy of science. Tom Eyers provides an important corrective to standard histories of the period, focussing on the ways in which French epistemological writing of the 1930s and 1940s - especially that of Bachelard and Canguilhem - laid the ground for the emergence of structuralism in the 1950s and 1960s, thus questioning the standard historical narrative that posits structuralism as emerging chiefly in reaction to phenomenology and existentialism.

Existentialism For Beginners

Existentialism For Beginners
Author: David Cogswell
Publisher: Red Wheel/Weiser
Total Pages: 232
Release: 2008-10-14
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1939994071

Existentialism For Beginners is an entertaining romp through the history of a philosophical movement that has had a broad and enduring influence on Western culture. From the middle of the Nineteenth Century through the late Twentieth Century, existentialism informed our politics and art, and still exerts its influence today. Tracing the movement’s beginnings with close-up views of seminal figures like Kierkegaard, Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche, Existentialism For Beginners follows its intellectual and literary trail to German philosophers Jaspers and Heidegger, and finally to the movement’s flowering in post-World-War-II France thanks to masterworks by such giants as Jean Paul Sartre, Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, plus many others. Illustrations throughout — at once lighthearted and gritty — help readers explore and understand a style of thinking that, while pervasive in its influence, is often seen as obscure, difficult, cryptic and dark. Existentialism For Beginners draws the movement’s many diverse elements together to provide an accessible introduction for those who seek a better understanding of the topic, and an enjoyable historical review packed with timeless quotes from existentialism’s leading lights.

Reasons without Rationalism

Reasons without Rationalism
Author: Kieran Setiya
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 143
Release: 2009-04-11
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400827728

Modern philosophy has been vexed by the question "Why should I be moral?" and by doubts about the rational authority of moral virtue. In Reasons without Rationalism, Kieran Setiya shows that these doubts rest on a mistake. The "should" of practical reason cannot be understood apart from the virtues of character, including such moral virtues as justice and benevolence, and the considerations to which the virtues make one sensitive thereby count as reasons to act. Proposing a new framework for debates about practical reason, Setiya argues that the only alternative to this "virtue theory" is a form of ethical rationalism in which reasons derive from the nature of intentional action. Despite its recent popularity, however, ethical rationalism is false. It wrongly assumes that we act "under the guise of the good," or it relies on dubious views about intention and motivation. It follows from the failure of rationalism that the virtue theory is true: we cannot be fully good without the perfection of practical reason, or have that perfection without being good. Addressing such topics as the psychology of virtue and the explanation of action, Reasons without Rationalism is essential reading for philosophers interested in ethics, rationality, or the philosophy of mind.

Existentialism

Existentialism
Author: Robert C. Solomon
Publisher:
Total Pages: 396
Release: 1974
Genre: Existentialism
ISBN: