Best of
Philosophy

1882

The Gay Science


Friedrich Nietzsche - 1882
    And yet it is complete in itself. For it is a work of art." —Walter Kaufmann in the IntroductionNietzsche called The Gay Science "the most personal of all my books." It was here that he first proclaimed the death of God—to which a large part of the book is devoted—and his doctrine of the eternal recurrence.Walter Kaufmann's commentary, with its many quotations from previously untranslated letters, brings to life Nietzsche as a human being and illuminates his philosophy. The book contains some of Nietzsche's most sustained discussions of art and morality, knowledge and truth, the intellectual conscience and the origin of logic.Most of the book was written just before Thus Spoke Zarathustra, the last part five years later, after Beyond Good and Evil. We encounter Zarathustra in these pages as well as many of Nietzsche's most interesting philosophical ideas and the largest collection of his own poetry that he himself ever published.Walter Kaufmann's English versions of Nietzsche represent one of the major translation enterprises of our time. He is the first philosopher to have translated Nietzsche's major works, and never before has a single translator given us so much of Nietzsche.

Essays of Schopenhauer


Arthur Schopenhauer - 1882
    He responded to and expanded upon Immanuel Kant's philosophy concerning the way in which we experience the world. His critique of Kant, his creative solutions to the problems of human experience and his explication of the limits of human knowledge are among his most important achievements. His metaphysical theory is the foundation of his influential writings on psychology, aesthetics, ethics, and politics which influenced Friedrich Nietzsche, Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Sigmund Freud and others. He said he was influenced by the Upanishads, Immanuel Kant, and Plato. References to Eastern philosophy and religion appear frequently in his writing. He appreciated the teachings of the Buddha and even called himself a Buddhaist. He said that his philosophy could not have been conceived before these teachings were available. He called himself a Kantian. He formulated a pessimistic philosophy that gained importance and support after the failure of the German and Austrian revolutions of 1848.

The Principles of Logic, Volume 2


F.H. Bradley - 1882
    This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: And for this purpose he ignores, and he must ignore, all that otherwise is implied in these characters. He has not to deal, for instance, with the question as to whether and how far judgment and inference are true. But the question of truth, the problem as to how, and how far, the ideas used in judgment and inference hold good of Reality, is essential to logic. And hence, aiming at its restricted end, logic, if it is to exist, must abstract. It must ignore, in general and in detail, that aspect of event which is really inseparable from all judgment and from every inference (see T. E. I. And cf. Mind, N. S., No. 33). Are we then to insist that psychological conditions are excluded from logic, and remain in every sense outside? To this enquiry our answer must, after all, be No. Or this exclusion, we may again reply, holds good rigidly, but only so far as the above conditions seek to enter as such. And I will now point out how within logic itself they still can appear, though never, whether generally or in detail, in their own special character. We may return here to the instance where the relative force, say of certain sensations, was the cause which brought into existence a certain judgment. This force, I repeat, remains, as force, external to the judgment. It can not in its own character pass into the content of that judgment and there claim recognition. But every judgment (we have convinced ourselves) must, on the other hand, contain and depend on an internal x. It is never mere R, but always R (x), that in the end we qualify as S ? P. Within this x falls every aspect that belongs to our Reality, and thus, though not given in its special character, every aspect is itself included in our judgment. Hence every psychical condition, such as, for example, the force of a sensatio...

Kant


William Wallace - 1882
    CHAPTER XIV. THE PROBLEMS OP ETHICS. He terms Art and Practical have each a stricter and a joser application. In the use of the word Art, which we have just been considering, it is employed to denote a mode of production which contains a certain personal siduum not amenable to rule or reducible to formula}. rn the looser sense, it is applied to any application of jiowledge to practical purposes, and simply denotes the production of an object according to rules or precepts. Similarly, the term Practical, in its wider sense, denotes the mode of laying down a theory, in which the theoretical principles are translated into precepts declaring that, if a certain result is desired, a certain means must bo adopted . In the narrower sense of the term Practical, it denotes something mi generis--viz., a law or direction which is not a mere corollary from some theoretical proposition, but is an entirely original and unconditioned command which appeals to no external considerations or ulterior consequences to justify or explain it, but claims nqualified, and, what is more, willing obedience. The ommand in question is that of the Moral Law. Man is, in one aspect, a member of creation, a link in" the great chain of nature. As such he presents himself with peculiar characters--some unique, others shared by several objects in nature. Under the latter head comes the fact that he is an organised being. Amongst the objects of nature, there are some exhibiting features which compel us to regard them as in a strict and peculiar way totals, with members in mutual interdependence, and all contributing to constitute the whole. In the case of these bodies, which we term organisms, instead of looking at the whole as a mere aggregation of the parts, we have to look...