Jean-Paul Sartre. Existentialism is humanism. Being and Nothing
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980) was born in Paris to a naval officer, Jean-Baptiste Sartre (who died when his son was only two years old), and Anne-Marie Schweitzer. The future writer and philosopher grew up in the family of his grandfather, Charles Schweitzer (the famous humanist thinker Albert Schweitzer was his nephew), an academic teacher and author of textbooks in the spirit of Voltairean freethinking and hatred of any tyranny. His grandfather’s huge library nourished his grandson’s young mind and predisposed him to a variety of interests. The family lived in “bourgeois prosperity,” and the child was protected from all sorts of life’s hardships, being a “good boy,” confident in the well-being of the entire world, which he comprehended through books: “I began my life, as, in all likelihood, I will end it — among books” (4: 381). Since he did not believe in God, he found in the book “his religion” and “his temple” (4: 390, 479). This childish godlessness (“Childhood decides everything,” Sartre believed) resulted in the conscious atheism of the future philosopher, and the “Leibnizian optimism” of a happy child — when confronted with a harsh and painful reality — transformed into a sharp rejection of it, rebellion and cynicism.
Martin Heidegger. Own and improper existence. Caring for the world and the people in it is the meaning of existence
Martin Heidegger was born in 1889 in the town of Messkirch in southern Germany, and studied at the Jesuit college in Constance and at the gymnasium in Freiburg im Breisgau, from which he graduated in 1909. There he entered the university, where he studied theology for the first two years, then philosophy, the humanities and the natural sciences. After completing his course in 1913, he defended his dissertation on the topic of “The Doctrine of Judgment in Psychologism”, then began teaching at the same university. In 1915, for his work “Duns Scotus’s Doctrine of Categories and Meanings”, he was promoted to associate professor. In the same year, he was drafted into the army (until 1918), but did not end up at the front. In 1923, he transferred to the position of extraordinary professor in Marburg (until 1928). In 1927, Heidegger’s main work, Being and Time, was published. In 1928, he was invited to Freiburg to head the department that became vacant after Husserl’s resignation.
Karl Jaspers. Modes of existence. All life is a borderline situation
Karl Jaspers was born in 1883. In 1901, after graduating from a classical gymnasium, he entered the Heidelberg University Faculty of Law, but after a year and a half he transferred to the medical faculty. His interest in medicine was due, among other reasons, to a severe congenital bronchial disease that caused attacks of heart failure. Such a disease usually kills no later than 30 years of age, but a conscious attitude to this “borderline situation” allowed Jaspers to live a full life and, in a sense, “defeat death”. In 1908, Jaspers graduated from the university, receiving the profession of a psychiatrist, in 1909 he became a doctor of medicine and went to work in the psychiatric and neurological clinic at Heidelberg University. In 1910, he married Gertrud Mayer, who became his friend and companion for life. She was seriously interested in philosophy, as was her brother, Ernst Mayer, a close friend of Jaspers. Largely under their influence, Jaspers moved from medicine as a natural science discipline first to psychology, and then to philosophy. The stages of this path are marked by his major works: 1913 – “General Psychopathology”; 1919 – “Psychology of Worldviews”. From this time on, his friendship with Heidegger begins.
Edmund Husserl. Phenomenology. Philosophy of arithmetic
Edmund Husserl was born in 1859 in Prossnitz (Moravia). During his studies – from 1876 at the University of Leipzig, from 1878 in Berlin, from 1881 in Vienna – he was primarily interested in mathematics, physics and astronomy. Among his university mentors were the famous mathematicians Leopold Kronecker and Karl Weierstrass. In 1882, Husserl defended his dissertation on “Some Problems in the Theory of the Calculus of Variations”. After receiving his degree, he worked for some time as Weierstrass’s private assistant.
Psychoanalysis. Sigmund Freud, Carl Gustav Jung, Alfred Adler, Erich Fromm. Concept of the unconscious
Psychoanalysis, founded by Sigmund Freud (1856-1939), emerged in 1895 as a project for scientific psychology that would provide a complete picture of inner spiritual life based on objective observation and analysis of individual phenomena. Psychoanalysis, in all its variations, has from the very beginning claimed to be the central theory of individual human mental life and human culture as a whole.
Pragmatism. William James, Charles Sanders Peirce, John Dewey. Instrumentalism. The Fundamental Role of Doubt
Pragmatism is the most important school of American philosophy. Its main representatives in the early stages were C. S. Peirce, W. James and J. Dewey. Charles Sanders Peirce is rightfully considered one of the most original and versatile philosophers that America has ever produced. As an innovative intellectual, he anticipated the development of a wide variety of scientific disciplines. His research left a noticeable mark on both the exact and natural sciences and the humanities. He was a mathematician, astronomer, chemist, surveyor, cartographer and engineer, but also a psychologist, philologist and historian of science. He was one of the first in the United States to engage in experimental psychology and the first to use the wavelength of light as a unit of measurement. His posthumous fame was made up of his works in the field of logic and semiotics, but he was also the author of an original metaphysical system. C. S. Peirce entered the history of philosophy as the founder of the philosophy of pragmatism, another direction of his intellectual creativity.
Henri Bergson. Only intuition can grasp the truth. Creative evolution
Henri Bergson was born in 1859 in Paris. Until the age of 19, he remained a British citizen, since his mother Catherine, who was passionate about art and instilled in her son a love for the English language, literature and poetry, was English. Henri, who was brought up in boarding schools from the age of 9, finally decided to stay in France and continue his education at the Lycée Condorcet. Bergson seriously and successfully studied mathematics: the famous mathematician Debauve, who taught him, included Bergson’s student article in his book on Blaise Pascal and modern geometry, and for it Bergson received his first prize – the Annales de Mathematics. Bergson’s transfer in 1881 to the Ecole Normale, where he later studied philosophy together with Durkheim, was a great disappointment for his professors: “You could have become a mathematician, but you only wanted to be a philosopher.”
Friedrich Nietzsche. Premonition of the future. The will to power. The principle of confrontation of opposing wills
Friedrich Nietzsche was born in 1844 in the town of Recken in Thuringia (Prussia). His father was a Protestant priest from the Polish nobility, which explains his unusual surname (it is believed that its Polish version is Nitzke). After the death of his father and younger brother in 1850, his mother moved with Friedrich and his sister Elisabeth to Naumburg. Here Friedrich went to school, from 1858 he studied at the Pforta Gymnasium and was friends with the future Vedanta researcher Paul Deussen, then studied theology and philology at the University of Bonn in 1864 and moved to Leipzig in 1865 to attend seminars of the famous philologist Ritschl and improve his music.
Neo-Kantianism. Friedrich Albert Lange and Otto Liebmann. Marburg, Baden school. The problem of substantiating the objectivity of knowledge
Neo-Kantianism is one of the dominant currents in philosophical thought in Germany in the second half of the 19th – first quarter of the 20th century. Its emergence can be roughly attributed to the mid-fifties of the 19th century, when Otto Liebmann proclaimed the slogan “Back to Kant!”
Second positivism. Ernst Mach, Avenarius. The subject of deification is man and humanity
Beginning in the mid-19th century, criticism of metaphysics as a set of teachings on the supersensible grew in philosophy. The transcendental was decisively expelled from philosophical systems. If such criticism came from existentially minded authors, it resulted in an emphasis on the significance of the mundane aspects of life; if it came from social philosophers, economic and other intra-social factors were put forward in place of Divine Providence as the driving force of history. And even while preserving the concept of the Divine, it acquired a new meaning: man and humanity became the object of deification.