Download or read book Pessimism written by Joshua Foa Dienstag and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2009-02-17 with total page 313 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Pessimism claims an impressive following--from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet "pessimist" remains a term of abuse--an accusation of a bad attitude--or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species--who would actually counsel pessimism? Joshua Foa Dienstag does. In Pessimism, he challenges the received wisdom about pessimism, arguing that there is an unrecognized yet coherent and vibrant pessimistic philosophical tradition. More than that, he argues that pessimistic thought may provide a critically needed alternative to the increasingly untenable progressivist ideas that have dominated thinking about politics throughout the modern period. Laying out powerful grounds for pessimism's claim that progress is not an enduring feature of human history, Dienstag argues that political theory must begin from this predicament. He persuasively shows that pessimism has been--and can again be--an energizing and even liberating philosophy, an ethic of radical possibility and not just a criticism of faith. The goal--of both the pessimistic spirit and of this fascinating account of pessimism--is not to depress us, but to edify us about our condition and to fortify us for life in a disordered and disenchanted universe.
Download or read book Weltschmerz written by Frederick C. Beiser and published by Oxford University Press. This book was released on 2016 with total page 312 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Frederick C. Beiser presents a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy from the 1860s to c. 1900: the theory that life is not worth living. He explores its major defenders and chief critics, and examines how the theory redirected German philosophy away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life.
Download or read book Cosmic Pessimism written by Eugene Thacker and published by U of Minnesota Press. This book was released on 2016-03-01 with total page 44 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “We’re doomed.” So begins the work of the philosopher whose unabashed and aphoristic indictments of the human condition have been cropping up recently in popular culture. Today we find ourselves in an increasingly inhospitable world that is, at the same time, starkly indifferent to our species-specific hopes, desires, and disappointments. In the Anthropocene, pessimism is felt everywhere but rarely given its proper place. Though pessimism may be, as Eugene Thacker says, the lowest form of philosophy, it may also contain an enigma central to understanding the horizon of the human. Written in a series of fragments, aphorisms, and prose poems, Thacker’s Cosmic Pessimism explores the varieties of pessimism and its often-conflicted relation to philosophy. “Crying, laughing, sleeping—what other responses are adequate to a life that is so indifferent?”
Download or read book Arthur Schopenhauer Philosopher of Pessimism written by Frederick C (Frederick Ch Copleston and published by Hassell Street Press. This book was released on 2021-09-09 with total page 240 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This work has been selected by scholars as being culturally important and is part of the knowledge base of civilization as we know it. This work is in the public domain in the United States of America, and possibly other nations. Within the United States, you may freely copy and distribute this work, as no entity (individual or corporate) has a copyright on the body of the work. Scholars believe, and we concur, that this work is important enough to be preserved, reproduced, and made generally available to the public. To ensure a quality reading experience, this work has been proofread and republished using a format that seamlessly blends the original graphical elements with text in an easy-to-read typeface. We appreciate your support of the preservation process, and thank you for being an important part of keeping this knowledge alive and relevant.
Download or read book The Kantian Foundation of Schopenhauer s Pessimism written by Dennis Vanden Auweele and published by Taylor & Francis. This book was released on 2017-04-21 with total page 257 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Cover -- Title -- Copyright -- Dedication -- Contents -- Preface -- Note on References -- Introduction -- 1 Schopenhauer's Philosophical Pedigree -- 2 Schopenhauer on Knowledge -- 3 Schopenhauer's Metaphysics -- 4 Schopenhauer on Ethics and Action -- 5 Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Religion -- 6 Schopenhauer's Aesthetics -- 7 Schopenhauer's Ascetics -- Conclusion -- Bibliography -- Index
Download or read book Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life They Change It written by Daniel Klein and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 2016-05-05 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Every time I find the meaning of life, they change it.” The words of Reinhold Niebuhr provide the title and set the tone for what is a wryly humorous look at some of the great philosophical pronouncements on the most important question we can face. Daniel Klein’s philosophical journey began fifty years ago with just this conundrum; he began an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Harvard University to glean some clue as to what the answer could be. Now in his seventies, Klein looks back at the wise words of the great philosophers and considers how his own life has measured up. Told with the same brilliantly dry sense of humour that made Travels with Epicurus a Sunday Times bestseller, Every Time I Find the Meaning of Life, They Change It is a pithy, dry, and eminently readable commentary on one of the most profound subjects there is.
Download or read book Dark Matters written by Mara van der Lugt and published by Princeton University Press. This book was released on 2023-09-26 with total page 472 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and makes a compelling case for the rediscovery of pessimism as a source for compassion, consolation, and perhaps even hope. Bringing to life one of the most vibrant eras in the history of philosophy, Mara van der Lugt discusses legendary figures such as Leibniz, Hume, Voltaire, Rousseau, Kant, and Schopenhauer. She also introduces readers to less familiar names, such as Bayle, King, La Mettrie, and Maupertuis. Van der Lugt describes not only how the earliest optimists and pessimists were deeply concerned with finding an answer to the question of the value of existence that does justice to the reality of human suffering, but also how they were fundamentally divided over what such an answer should look like. A breathtaking work of intellectual history by one of today's leading scholars, Dark Matters reveals how the crucial moral aim of pessimism is to find a way of speaking about suffering that offers consolation and does justice to the fragility of life.
Download or read book Nietzsche and the Philosophy of Pessimism written by Tobias Dahlkvist and published by Uppsala Universitet. This book was released on 2007 with total page 301 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book Pessimism a History and a Criticism written by James Sully and published by . This book was released on 1891 with total page 332 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:
Download or read book The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer written by Robert L. Wicks and published by Oxford University Press, USA. This book was released on 2020-04-09 with total page 634 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Though known primarily as a herald of philosophical pessimism, the full range of Schopenhauer's contributions is displayed here in a collection of thirty-one essays on the forefront of Schopenhauer scholarship. The essays explore his central notions, including the will, empirical knowledge, and the sublime, and widens to the interplay of ethics and religion with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Authors confront difficult aspects of Schopenhauer's work and legacy - for example, the extent to which Schopenhauer adopted ideas from his predecessors compared to how much was original and visionary in his central claim that reality is a blind, senseless 'will,' the effectiveness of his philosophy in the field of scientific explanation and extrasensory phenomena, and the role of beauty and sublimity in his outlook.--
Download or read book Infinite Resignation written by Eugene Thacker and published by Watkins Media Limited. This book was released on 2018-07-17 with total page 349 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: “Scholarly advice for dark times.” —The New Yorker “Provides a metric ton of misery and a lot of company.” —New York Times “Probably philosophy’s only beach read.” —Vice A ‘nihilist’s devotional,’ this collection aphorisms, fragments, and observations on philosophy and pessimism offer a raw look at the human condition Dark times lie around us and ahead of us, and what better way to survive the coming Apocolypse than by immersing yourself in some of the greatest thinkers on pessimism, brought together with his own thoughts on the subject by Eugene Thacker, author of the contemporary classic, In the Dust of This Planet. Comprised of aphorisms, fragments, and observations both philosophical and personal, Infinite Resignation traces the contours of pessimism, caught as it often is between a philosophical position and a bad attitude. Reflecting on the universe’s “looming abyss of indifference,” Thacker explores the pessimism of a range of philosophers, from the well-known (Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Camus), to the lesser-known (E.M. Cioran, Lev Shestov, Miguel de Unamuno). Readers will find food for thought in Thacker’s handling of a range of themes in Christianity and Buddhism, as well as his engagement with literary figures (from Dostoevsky to Thomas Bernhard, Osamu Dazai, and Fernando Pessoa), whose pessimism about the world both inspires and depresses Thacker. By turns melancholic, misanthropic, and darkly funny, Infinite Resignation is a welcome antidote to the exuberant imbecility of our times.
Download or read book Pessimism of the Intellect Optimism of the Will written by Kai Nielsen and published by . This book was released on 2012 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Kai Nielsen is one of Canada's most distinguished political philosophers. In a career spanning over 40 years, he has published more than 400 papers in political philosophy, ethics, meta-philosophy, and philosophy of religion. Pessimism of the Intellect presents a thoughtful collection of Nielsen's essays complemented by an extended reflective interview with Nielsen. This collection allows the reader to grasp the systematic scope of his thought and methodology.
Download or read book Reimagining Life written by Raihan Kadri and published by Fairleigh Dickinson. This book was released on 2011-06-07 with total page 207 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Reimagining Life, Raihan Kadri presents a pioneering critical history of the epistemological and theoretical origins of the Surrealist movement and its subsequent legacy. The book contains extensive examination and new interpretations of the oft-neglected theoretical writing of Surrealists such as André Breton, Louis Aragon, Antonin Artaud, and Salvador Dalí, in order to demonstrate how Surrealism is connected to a broader lineage of philiosophical pessimism-involving such figures as Fredrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, and Arthur Rimbaud-which Kadri argues represents a particular strain of modernism aimed at breaking human thought away from the constraints of religion and other forms of idealism in order to expand the possibilities for knowledge and human freedom. The innovative, wide-ranging study deftly traverses fields of art, politics, philosophy, psychology, and literature. Reimagining Life redefines Surrealism's place in modern intellectual history and offers a new vision of how Surrealist discourse can be connected to contemporary debates in cultural, critical, and theoretical studies.
Download or read book Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint written by Sophia Vasalou and published by Cambridge University Press. This book was released on 2013-07-18 with total page 247 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics.
Download or read book Philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer written by Arthur Schopenhauer and published by . This book was released on 2013-10 with total page 344 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This is a new release of the original 1949 edition.
Download or read book A Feeling of Wrongness written by Joseph Packer and published by Penn State Press. This book was released on 2018-11-28 with total page 229 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In A Feeling of Wrongness, Joseph Packer and Ethan Stoneman confront the rhetorical challenge inherent in the concept of pessimism by analyzing how it is represented in an eclectic range of texts on the fringes of popular culture, from adult animated cartoons to speculative fiction. Packer and Stoneman explore how narratives such as True Detective, Rick and Morty, Final Fantasy VII, Lovecraftian weird fiction, and the pop ideology of transhumanism are better suited to communicate pessimistic affect to their fans than most carefully argued philosophical treatises and polemics. They show how these popular nondiscursive texts successfully circumvent the typical defenses against pessimism identified by Peter Wessel Zapffe as distraction, isolation, anchoring, and sublimation. They twist genres, upend common tropes, and disturb conventional narrative structures in a way that catches their audience off guard, resulting in belief without cognition, a more rhetorically effective form of pessimism than philosophical pessimism. While philosophers and polemicists argue for pessimism in accord with the inherently optimistic structures of expressive thought or rhetoric, Packer and Stoneman show how popular texts are able to communicate their pessimism in ways that are paradoxically freed from the restrictive tools of optimism. A Feeling of Wrongness thus presents uncharted rhetorical possibilities for narrative, making visible the rhetorical efficacy of alternate ways and means of persuasion.
Download or read book The Philosophy of Disenchantment written by Edgar Saltus and published by Createspace Independent Publishing Platform. This book was released on 2016-04-06 with total page 142 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[...]enumerate." The doctrine of Epicurus held, in substance, that the moment it was no longer possible to delight the senses death became a benefit, and suicide a crowning act of wisdom. The teaching of the Socratic school and its offshoots amounted, in brief, to the idea that the only admissible aim of life was the pursuit and attainment of absolute knowledge. Absolute knowledge, however, being found unattainable, the logical culmination of their doctrine was delivered by Hegesias, in Alexandria, in the third century before the Christian era. This disciple of Socrates argued that as there was a limit to the knowable, and happiness was a pure illusion, a further prolongation of [...]".
