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.
First positivism. Auguste Comte, John Stuart Mill, Herbert Spencer. Philosophy should contribute to the progress of specific scientific disciplines
Positivism is one of the most influential trends in Western philosophy over the past two centuries. Positivism has gone through three main stages in its development. The first stage is associated with the teachings of Comte, Mill, and Spencer. The second stage is the empiriocriticism of Mach and Avenarius. The third is the logical positivism of the Vienna Circle (or the neopositivism of Schlick, Carnap, and others). Supporters of positivism are united by the conviction that it is impossible to construct a “true” metaphysics. From the point of view of positivism, statements about the substantial essence of things cannot be scientific. Rejecting ontology as an untenable pseudoscience, the positivists did not propose the abolition of philosophy as such. They believed that genuine (“positive”) philosophy should contribute to the progress of concrete scientific disciplines.
Marxism. Karl Marx. Friedrich Engels. Materialistic understanding of history
In the philosophical and social thought of the 19th and 20th centuries, a special and significant place is occupied by the concept created in the mid-19th century by Karl Marx and subsequently developed by many other Marxist theorists. Due to the fact that the provisions of Marxism served as an ideological platform for the communist movement and many revolutionary uprisings around the world, the most significant of which were undoubtedly the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, which brought the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin to power, and the Chinese Revolution of 1949, carried out by the Chinese Communist Party under the leadership of Mao Zedong, Marxism in its various versions has had the most serious impact on the historical destinies of many countries, but with the collapse of the USSR this influence has been steadily declining. In theoretical terms, however, Marxism was and remains one of the leading social concepts, which in many ways determined the appearance of modern social science. In the history of philosophy, Marxism appears as the heir and at the same time the antipode of Hegel’s idealism, which turned Hegel’s thought “upside down”, i.e. gave philosophy a critical social orientation and transformed theoretical criticism into a tool serving the goals of revolutionary social transformations.
Hegelian philosophy. Herbert Bradley, Josiah Royce, Alexandre Kojève. The criterion of truth is the reality of knowledge
Hegelian philosophy underwent a very complex evolution during the 19th and 20th centuries. Few of Hegel’s followers fully agreed with the philosopher, and most Hegelians preferred an independent way of thinking, which is why we cannot equate Hegel’s philosophy with Hegelianism. An exception is the so-called Hegelian school, which arose during the philosopher’s lifetime and included mainly his students and friends who tried to create an orthodox image of Hegelian philosophy. It was thanks to their efforts that shortly after Hegel’s death a collection of his works was published, the so-called “edition of friends” (1832-1840), which included both works published during his lifetime and recordings of his lecture courses.
Soren Kierkegaard. Definition of faith through the concept of sin. Stages of human existence
Søren Kierkegaard was born in Copenhagen in 1813 to a wealthy wool merchant. At the age of 17, in 1830, in accordance with his father’s wishes, Kierkegaard began his studies at the theological faculty of the University of Copenhagen. Physically much weaker than his peers, Kierkegaard stood out against their background with his extraordinary intellectual abilities. In 1840, he passed the exam in theology, and in 1841 he successfully defended his master’s dissertation “On the Concept of Irony with a Constant Glance at Socrates.” Irony and humor, as two basic forms of the comic, play a far from accidental role in Kierkegaard’s teaching. Kierkegaard returns to these concepts in his subsequent works.
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach. Anthropological principle. I think with feelings
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was born in 1804 in the Bavarian town of Landshut to a family of a famous criminologist. He studied theology at the University of Heidelberg, then philosophy at the University of Berlin, where he attended Hegel’s lectures for four years. It was to Hegel that he dedicated his dissertation “On the One, Universal, and Infinite Reason” in 1828. At the same time, he began his teaching career at the University of Erlangen. But after his authorship of the extremely bold work “Thoughts on Death and Immortality”, published anonymously in 1830, was revealed, Feuerbach was dismissed from the university. Then he concentrated on historical and philosophical research: “The History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza” (1833), “On Leibniz” (1837), “On Pierre Bayle” (1838), reviews of Hegel’s “History of Philosophy” and Stahl’s “Philosophy of Right”. At this time, his philosophical aphorisms “Writer and Man” (1834) were published. Having moved in 1837 for 25 years to the small village of Bruckberg in Thuringia, Feuerbach took an active part in the publication of the Young Hegelian “Hallische Jahrbucher”.