POST MODERN

PHILOSOPHY
GUINO-O, SANCHEZ, BONGCO,
CALIMBAS, TANTOCO
12- DEL RIO
MR. IAN
 Postmodernism as a philosophical
movement is largely a reaction
against the philosophical
assumptions and values of the
modern period of Western. The period
from about the time of the scientific
revolution of the 16th and 17th
centuries to the mid-20th century.
 Postmodernism is a reaction to modernism. It
corrects problems from the past, but also
over-reacts to those problems, leading to an
exaggeration. So, the chief strengths of
postmodernism are in what it corrects, and it’s
chief weaknesses are in what it over-corrects.

 Postmodernism corrects this by denying the

equivalency between scientific truth and
absolute truth. All scientific conclusions are
now understood to be tentative simply
because no one has ever made the infinite
number of observations required to learn if
there are any exceptions.
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
 A French atheist existentialist
 Existential Phenomology –
designed to see what every
existing thing means to
someone who experiences it
by thorough reflection and
through awareness of himself
as an existing being
 Proclaimed:
“Existence precedes essence”
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
 Life is nothing in the
beginning, what it becomes
depends on how we live it.
 We are the CREATORS of
our own individual lives
because we are FREE
 FREE to create the kind of
life we want
 But we can only control our
will but not the things that
are beyond our will
Jean-Paul Sartre (1905-1980)
Quotes:
 Everything has been figured
out, except how to live.
 Only the guy who isn't
rowing has time to rock the
boat.
 If you are lonely when you
are alone, you are in bad
company.
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
 German Philosopher who
treats death as an
existential human
condition
 Called the human person
“Dasein”
 His concern is to describe
the existential condition of
an existing human being in
the world
 Interested with the
question how a human
person exists in the world,
not their nature.
Dasein (da-zein)
 German word/s
‘Das’(meaning there)
and ‘Sein’(meaning
being)
 Literally means “being
there”
 Man is thrown into the
world to know himself
in order to shape the
meaning of his
existence
Dasein (da-zein)
 Meaning of human
existence comes from
understanding what
man has of himself, as a
being-in-the-world
 German words ‘Das’
(meaning there) and
‘Sein’(meaning being)
 Man is thrown into the
world to know himself in
order to shape the
meaning of his existence
Dasein as a being-in-the-world
Man is a being who is set
toward the realization of his
possibilities
 Concepts of facticity and
fallenness comes in
Facticity-refers to a person’s
condition of being thrown
into this particular situations
he/she didn’t choose
Fallenness-refers to how
trapped a person into the
world of “they” (conformity)
Martin Heidegger (1889-1976)
Quotes:
 The most thought-
provoking thing in our
thought-provoking
time is that we are still
not thinking
 Why are there beings
at all, instead of
Nothing?
Friedrich Nietzsche
(1889-1951)  Is the person most responsible for transitioning
philosophical thinking into postmodernism.
 He is considered an important forerunner of
Existentialism.
 He challenged the foundations of Christianity
and traditional morality, famously asserting
that "God is dead", leading to charges of
Atheism, Moral Skepticism, Relativism and
Nihilism.
 He also wrote in a uniquely provocative style
he called himself a "philosopher of the
hammer", and he frequently delivered
trenchant critiques of Christianity and of great
philosophers like Plato and Kant in the most
offensive and blasphemous terms possible.
 His writings on truth, morality, aesthetics,
history, nihilism, power, consciousness, and
the meaning of existence.
 Nietzsche concludes that truth is nothing
more than an illusion.
 For Nietzsche, therefore, sorrows and
troubles were not to
be denied or escaped but to
be welcomed and cultivated and
thereby turned to one's advantage.
 This is exemplified by a famous quote from
his book "Ecce Homo": "what does not kill
me, makes me stronger".
The Four Major Concepts
 Nihilism and the Revaluation of Values
-The famous statement “God is dead” The phrase first
appeared in Nietzsche's 1882 collection The Gay Science.
He argued that modern science and the increasing
secularization of European society had effectively "killed"
the Christian God, who had served as the basis for
meaning and value in the West for more than thousand
years.

 The Human Exemplar

"Übermensch“ introduced in his 1883 book "Thus Spoke
Zarathustra“. this refers to the person who lives above and
beyond pleasure and suffering, treating both
circumstances equally, because joy and suffering are, in
his view, inseparable. The Übermensch is the person who
lives life to the full according to his own values, a free spirit,
unihibited and confident, although exhibiting an
underlying generosity of spirit, and avoiding instinctively all
those values which Nietzsche considered negative.
 Will to Power
The will to power is the title of an unfinished
work, begun to 1883, which was intended
to reflect on the transmutation of values.
But expression appears only in the last
phase of the evolution of Nietzsche‘s
thought. This concept refers to the overall
dynamics of our instincts. Once there is life,
there is will to power because life is only
alive if it is intensified. The will to power is a
laboratory test by which life is an artist, a
designer, a conqueror. It is a field of
experience: nothing is impossible.
Eternal Recurrence
a theory that the universe and all
existence and energy has been recurring,
and will continue to recur, in a self-similar
form an infinite number of times across
infinite time or space. Eternal return is
based on the philosophy of pre-
determinism in that people are
predestined to continue repeating the
same events over and over again.
 The Birth of Tragedy
- First Book that is only way life can be
justified is as an aesthetic phenomenon.
- Existence and the world become
meaningful not as objects of knowledge
but as artistic experiences.
Sigmund Freud
Sigmund Freud
 was the founding father
of psychoanalysis, a method for
treating mental illness and also a theory
which explains human behavior.
Sigmund Freud
 Freud believed that events in our
childhood have a great influence on our
adult lives, shaping our personality. For
example, anxiety originating from
traumatic experiences in a person's past is
hidden from consciousness, and may
cause problems during adulthood
Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951)
 An Austrian-British philosopher who
worked primarily in logic, the
philosophy of mathematics, the
philosophy of mind, and the
philosophy of language.
 Language Game
It asks: “Can language objectively
describe truth?” concluded that
language cannot objectively describe
truth. This is because, he said, all
language is socially conditioned. We
understand the world solely in terms of
our language games – that is, our
linguistic, social constructs. According
to Wittgenstein, truth, as we perceive it,
is itself socially constructed.
• Wittgenstein, in his early positivist work, saw
sentences as pictures of the world. He later came
to the view that language is, in fact, a series of
games that are played out, each with its own rules.

• He saw philosophical problems as coming not from

the real world, but from language itself. Our
concepts define our experience which we
understand only through words.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813-1855)
• Danish philosopher concerning
the person which proportionally in
position with the concrete
existence he has lived.

• religious author who is widely

considered to be the first
existentialist philosopher

• Considered as “the father of

Existentialism”

 Born: 5 May 1813

 Died: 11 November 1855

 Full name: Søren Aabye

Kierkegaard
“Philosopy of Existentialism”
 His existential theology saw the birth of
existentialism as a philosophy because he wanted
to see the individual person as achieving the
fullness of his own human existence.

 His philosophy was basically a manifestation of

distrust and a little perhaps of hatred on any
institution that tends to encage the person.

 A person loses his individuality when he is

absorbed by the presence of the crowd.
Philosopy of Existentialism
 "...the
thing is to find a truth which is true
for me, to find the idea for which I can live
and die"
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard - Journals 1835
Philosopy of existentialism
 He was primarily a philosopher who asked searching
questions as to how best, that precious and rare
thing, a Human life,ought to be lived. He himself used
the terms existential and existentialism in relation to
his philosophisings, his heartfelt view was that life,
existence, in all its aspects was subjective and
ambiguous. Philosophy was seen as an expression of
an intensely and courageously examined individual
existence - an expression that was, hopefully, free
from illusion. In his view individuals must be prepared
to defy the accepted practices of society, if this was
necessary to their leading, what seemed to that
person, to be a personally valid and meaningful life.
According to Søren Kierkegaard
Man has three stages in life: the aesthetic, the ethical, and the
religious
Aesthetic:
 Aesthetical lives were lives lived in search
of such things pleasure, novelty, and
romantic individualism. Kierkegaard
thought that such "pleasure", such
"novelty", and such "romantic
individualism" would eventually tend to
decay or become meaningless and this
would inevitably lead to much boredom
and dire frustration.
Aesthetic:
 pursuit of pleasant but trivial goals, superficial achievements
 easily develop feelings of emptiness and dread (AKA angst)
about superficiality of life
 Kierkegaard’s belief: angst=good (provides recognition of the
triviality of one’s life and pursuits, and can lead to hope of a new
life)
Ethical:
 Ethical lives, meanwhile, as being lived very
much in line with a sense of duty to observe
societal and confessional obligations. Such a
life would be easy, in some ways, to live, yet
would also involve much compromise of
several genuinely human faculties and
potentials. Such compromise would inevitably
mean that Human integrity would tend to be
eroded although lives seemed to be
progressing in a bourgeois-satisfactory way.
Ethical:
 transcending “shallow pleasantries” of social acceptance
 attempt to do what is right personally
 Free will
Religious:
 In his later works he suggested that there was a third,
religious, "sphere" where people accepted that they
could "live in the truth" that they were "individual
before the Eternal" to which they belonged. By living
in this truth people could achieve a full unity of
purpose with all other people who were also,
individually, living in the same truth. This is the choice
that he made for himself in his own efforts to live a life
which he considered to be valid.
 surrender any concept of self, essentially consumed
by God
Religious:
 surrender
any concept of self, essentially
consumed by God
Famous quotes:
 Lifecan only be understood backwards;
but it must be lived forwards.

 Lifeis not a problem to be solved, but a

reality to be experienced.
Gabriel Marcel (1889-1973)
 French theists existentialist.
 He describe his early
childhood as a “desolate
universe”.
 Philosophy is rooted in
despair.
 Pursued concrete existential
philosophy
 Known as the defender of
human dignity against the
totalitarianism of mass
society that dehumanizes
man from himself
Problem and Mysteries
 Scientificthinking with its reductionism and
technicality, avoids the mystery of life in
favor of problems and solution.
 “Problem” is something that can be viewed
objectively and for which we can find
possible solutions.
 “Mystery” is something which can not be
viewed objectively, because we can not
separate ourselves from it.
 Existence is beyond objective inquiry and is
thus a mystery.
Man’s Level of Participation
 Incarnation is the existence of a person in
the world through his body.
 Acting involves in relationship to other
human beings, a relation acted upon
hope, fidelity and love.
A person can find his identity by acting.

 True
identity is attained through acting in
hope fidelity and love.

Persons identity is not about his title or

value in the society but him being the
image of God.
Hope, Fidelity and Love
 Hope is a trans-subjective appeal to other
person
 Fidelity is a commitment to another person.
Response to the worth of the other person
as person.
 Love it is immortal.
 The act of participation In hope, fidelity and
love are acts communion to the absolute
thou (God), by his communion with God he
regained his true dignity: truly an image of
God. He becomes himself and a person.
 I-Thou Relationship in the
Thought of Marcel
 Man’s awareness of himself as a person is
possible only in relationship to others.
 It is an illusion to say that “I” am the center
of the universe.
 Two things that makes us persons:
behaving by assuming responsibilities for our
actions and believing in the existence of
others and permitting this belief to influence
our conduct.
 We are meant to be in our full personhood
by our availability
Bertrand Russell (1872-1970)
 Britishphilosopher, logician, and
social reformer, founding figure
in the analytic movement in
Anglo-American philosophy.
 Has contributions to logic,
epistemology, and the
philosophy of mathematics
 campaigner for peace and as a
popular writer on social,
political, and moral subjects.
Contributions
 Russell used logic in an attempt to clarify issues in the
foundations of mathematics and to clarify issues in
philosophy.
 "On Denoting" and the huge "Principia
Mathematica“ with Alfred North Whitehead
 strove to eliminate what they saw as meaningless
and incoherent assertions in philosophy and sought
clarity and precision in argument by the use of
exact language and by breaking down
philosophical propositions into their simplest
grammatical components. Russell, in particular, saw
formal Logic and science as the principal tools of
the philosopher, and he wanted to end what he
saw as the excesses of Metaphysics, adopting
William of Ockham's principle against multiplying
unnecessary entities (Occam's Razor) as a central
part of the method of analysis.
Contributions
 To mathematics and logicism
 Philosophy of language.
 Logical Atomism
 Epistemology
 Ethics
 He believed that despite any positive
effects it might have, religion was largely
harmful to people, serving to impede
knowledge, foster fear and dependency,
and cause much of the war, oppression
and misery that have beset the world.
Aphorism and Quotable Quotes
I would never die for my beliefs because I
might be wrong.
 Government can easily exist without laws,
but law cannot exist without government.
 I shouldn't wish people dogmatically to
believe any philosophy, not even mine.
 It has been said that man is a rational
animal. All my life I have been searching for
evidence which could support this.