idealism

the theory of evolution

"You are what you eat."

materialism

"that God and gods were solely human creations [projections of human qualities into objects of worship], and were entirely to be understood in this way."

Karl Marx

forces of production and competing socioeconomic classes

It would "collapse of its own internal contradictions."

that of Marx and Friedrich Engels.

"German philosophy, French political theory, and British economics"

"one, that reality is not a state of affairs but an ongoing historical process; two, that because of this, the key to understanding reality is to understand the nature of historical change; three, that historical change is not random but obeys a discoverable law; four, that the discoverable law of change is the dialectic, with its repeated triadic movement of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; five, that what keeps this law perpetually in operation is alienation, which ensures that each successive state of affairs is eventually brought to an end by its own internal contradictions; six, that the process is not under the control of human beings, but is driven forward by its own internal laws, and human beings are swept along by it; seven, that the process as thus described will continue until a situation is reached in which all internal contradictions have been resolved: there will then be no alienation, and therefore no longer any force at work promoting change; eight, that when this conflict-free situation is reached, human beings will no longer be swept along by forces outside their control, but will be able for the first time to take their destiny into their own hands , and will become themselves the arbiters of change; nine, that this will for the first time make human freedom and self-fulfillment possible for human beings; ten, that the form of society within which this freedom will be exercised and self-fulfillment achieved, will not be the atomized society of independently functioning individuals that is envisioned by liberals, but an organic society in which individuals are absorbed into a whole that is much bigger, and therefore more fulfilling, than their own separate lives."

"'historical materialism' or, alternatively, 'dialectical materialism'

"The philosophers have only interpreted the world in various ways; the point is to change it."

"the opium of the people"

"And although scarcely any serious thinkers nowadays would accept the validity of the analysis as a whole, there can be no doubt that much of it is insightful, and has made a major contribution to what might be called the modern outlook."

". . . wherever Marxist political movements came to power the result was, invariably and without exception, a bureaucratic dictatorship, a society not in the least like the one the theory had claimed was inevitable."

the belief "that the true function of art is social criticism. . . . Bad art is art which upholds the values of existing society, and tries to lull or deceive people into accepting those values. . . . [This view] comes close to being the prevailing orthodoxy in today's world."

Utilitarianism

While retaining the utilitarian emphasis on the greatest happiness for the greatest number, Mill replaced Bentham's "rather crude quantitative" measurement of pleasure or happiness by qualitative measure, of the type of pleasure enjoyed.

"It is better to be a human being dissatisfied than a pig satisfied; better to be Socrates dissatisfied than a fool satisfied."

hedonism

A French philosopher (1789-1857) who originated positivism, which maintains that knowledge goes through the stages of religious, metaphysical, and positive, scientific. In the positive stage only facts discovered through empirical observation are accepted. He also originated sociology.

"the ultimate bourgeois, the satisfied utilitarian, the absolute couch potato."

1. Dionysian: named for "Dionysus, the god of wine, sexuality, and revelry, represents the dynamic flux of being, the acceptance of fate, the chaos of creativity. The individual is dispensable from this perspective, but the individual can find profound satisfaction in being part of the wild, unfolding rush of life. Indeed, from the Dionysian perspective, individual existence is just an illusion; our true reality is our participation in the life of the whole."

2. Apollonian: named for "Apollo, the sun god, by contrast, reflects the Athenian fascination with beauty and order. From the Apollonian perspective, the individual's existence is undeniably real and human vulnerability is genuinely horrible. Yet the Apollonian perspective makes this reality appear beautiful and enables us to forget our vulnerability for a time and simply love our finite lives in the world."

In contrast with the morality of the ancient Athenians, a morality of heroism and mastery, Christian morality has made the bland, mediocre person the moral exemplar. . . . According to Nietzsche, many if not most of the prohibitions of Judeo-Christian (and Kantian) ethics are 'leveling' devices that favor the weak and mediocre and put more talented and stronger spirits at a disadvantage. Accordingly, Nietzsche defends a view 'beyond good and evil,' beyond our tendencies to pass moralistic judgments on our own and others' behavior, toward a more creative psychological and naturalistic perspective."

"'Dare to become what you are.' This is how all living creatures behave spontaneously in nature after all. Of course it will bring us into conflict with one another, but what is wrong with that? The bold and adventurous find conflict exciting, they relish it, and it helps to stretch them to their utmost, which they also enjoy, and which develops their abilities. Of course the weak go under, but that is to be welcomed. To want to abolish strife, suffering, and defeat is just as uncomprehending and futile as it would be to want to abolish bad weather."

"The imaginative, the daring, the creative, the bold, the courageous, the curious and brave, nature's leaders of all kinds, should be free, untrammelled by slave moralities - free to live life to the full, and to fulfil themselves. Nietzsche called their drive to do this their "will to power," by which he was thinking not only of politics or conquests but of cultural activities as well."

"Conscience is but a word that cowards use

Devised at first to keep the strong in awe.

Our strong arms be our conscience, swords our law!"

1. "the challenge it presents"

2. "Nietzsche's own answer to that challenge"

"Most people have found the challenge legitimate and exceedingly powerful while rejecting Nietzsche's own response to it. The challenge is that if we no longer hold traditional religious beliefs it is illegitimate for us to go on embracing a morality and values that derive their justification from those beliefs. Our whole position, if we do that, is phony, false. We are under an obligation to, as Nietzsche puts it, reevaluate our values. In other words we need, from the bottom up, to carry out a radical reappraisal of our morals and our values on the basis of beliefs that we do really genuinely hold. This is a hair-raising challenge, and one of fundamental urgency in an increasingly irreligious world."

existentialism

Relativism, the idea that one perspective-or, especially, an ethical rule--is as good or bad as another, with no way of judging whether one outlook, or civilization, is superior to another. It's all a matter of personal or societal preference.

This kind of relativism should not be confused with the physical relativity discovered by Einstein.

"we often do not and cannot know what is going on in our own minds [which] would become the premise--or at least the problem --for generations of philosophers and social thinkers."

In addition, Dragan Milovanovic's "Key Concepts" of modernist and postmodernist positions:

Modernist: equilibrium; homeostasis; tension reduction; order; homogeneity; consensus; stasis; normativity; foundationalism; logocentricism; totality; closure; transcendental signifiers; structural functionalism.

Postmodernist: far-from-equilibrium conditions; flux; change; chance; spontaneity; irony; orderly disorder; heterogeneity; diversity; intensity; paralogism; toleration for the incommensurable; dissipative structures; antifoundationalism; fragmentation; coupling; impossibility of formal closure; structural dislocations/undecidability; constitutive theory.

1. Existentialism and phenomenology. Some of this is dealt with in S&H 226-28 and 274-82.

Existentialism: "A philosophy that begins with contingent existence of the individual human being and regards that as the primary enigma. It is from that starting point that philosophical understanding is pursued. There are two strands, religious existentialism and humanist existentialism." Magee 229. See S&H 277-82

Phenomenology: "An approach to philosophy, begun by Edmund Husserl (1859-1938), which investigates objects of experience without raising what may be unanswerable questionable questions about their independent nature." Magee 230. Husserl is dealt with at S&H 250-52. His emphasis on individual consciousness contributed to existentialism.

2. Analytic and linguistic philosophy. Some aspects of this are dealt with in S&H 245-54 and 282-86.

Analytic philosophy: "A view of philosophy that sees its aim as clarification - for instance the clarification of concepts, statements, methods, arguments, and theories by carefully taking them apart." Magee 228 This is in contrast to traditional systematic, synthetic, speculative philosophy, which Whitehead described as "the endeavour to frame a coherent, logical, necessary system of general ideas in terms of which every element of our experience can be interpreted." Process and Reality, 3.

Linguistic philosophy: "Also known as Linguistic Analysis. The view that philosophical problems arise from a muddled use of language, and are to be solved, or dissolved, by a careful analysis of the language in which they have been expressed." Magee 229

3. Pragmatism. Dealt with in S&H 240-41.

"A theory of truth. It holds that a statement is true if [it works, if] it does all the jobs required of it, i.e. accurately describes a situation, prompts us to anticipate experiences correctly, fits in with already well-attested statements, and so on. . . ." Magee 230

4. Perennialism or primordialism

5. Destructive postmodernism: post-structuralism, deconstruction

6. Constructive postmodernism: process philosophy (psychicalism, panexperientialism). Some of this is dealt with in S&H 264-66. "It seeks to overcome the modern worldview not by eliminating the possibility of worldviews as such, but by constructing a postmodern worldview through a revision of modern premises and traditional concepts. This constructive or revisionary postmodernism involves a new unity of scientific, ethical, aesthetic, and religious intuitions. It rejects not science as such but only that scientism in which the data of the modern natural sciences are alone allowed to contribute to the construction of our worldview." Ibid. See the section immediately below.

Traditional Western: (1) being, (2) permanence, and (3) uniformity;

process: (1) becoming, (2) change, and (3) novelty.

"Reality--including both the natural world and the human sphere--is essentially historical in this view, emerging from (and bearing) a past and advancing into a novel future. Hence, it cannot be grasped by the static spatial concepts of the old views, which ignore the temporal and novel aspects of the universe given in man's experience. . . ."

"1) that the whole of everything is not made up of things, but of events becoming, as opposed to being and 2) that every event, however small, affects every other, that events are related."

"newness, sometimes delightful, sometimes not, but fresh."

"What God is growing into, and what I and you are growing into."

"Process thinking requires that I live in the present . . . where I live is here and now, in all the wonderful grubbiness of the present, and little miracles happen all around me."

"a making of myself and of my world and of my God."

"a mechanistic or substance image of reality which provided no clues at all to the meaning of my life and its fundamental experiences of value. . . . As for mind, purposes, and feelings-they are at most regarded as epiphenomena, which means they are seen as side-effects, not causes."

"they take account of their environment, without being fully determined by it. This 'taking account of' is technically called an internal relation. The phrase is useful as a contrast to an external relation. Most Western thought has focused on external relations (that push or pull). An external relation does not affect the nature of the things related."

It "is something that feels and acts as one. The process proposition is that everything is either such an occasion of experience or is made up of entities that are occasions of experience. Things such as rocks, solar systems, and computers are not individual entities that feel. They are aggregates of individual entities, the atoms and molecules that compose them."

"The world is more like a life than a mechanism. It is feeling through and through, from protons to people. There is a sense of newness with which the world, of process, imbued with Life, is viewed, a new feeling of possessing, being possessed, and of participation. At its heart it is A. N. Whitehead's "Peace" which, for him, was an individual experience including within itself the harmony and integrity of the universe."

"bursts of [living] energy, each coming into being and fading away in a split second"

"God is the supreme, but not the exclusive factor, influencing the process or forward movement of reality."

"to greater complexity or beauty. Beauty equals variety and intensity."

"None of [the] laws of nature gives the slightest evidence of necessity. They are the modes of procedure which within the scale of our observations do in fact prevail. . . ."