PHILOSOPHY Final Digest

7/29/2019 PHILOSOPHY Final Digest

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Name : Denz Jovelle D. Salcines Section : 2CA4

Student # : 2011035893 Date : March 11, 2013

JEAN – JACQUES ROUSSEAU

CHAPTER I : SUBJECT OF THE FIRST BOOK

Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains.

He who believes himself the master of others does not escape being more of a slave

than they.

The social order is a sacred right which serves as a foundation for all other rights, and it

does not come from nature.

Therefore It is founded upon convention.

CHAPTER II : OF THE FIRST SOCIETIES

Family is the most ancient of all societies also the only natural one.

Children remain bound to their father only so long as they need him to take care of

them.

The natural bond is dissolved when the needs of his children ceases.

All return equally to independence, once the children are freed from the obedience they

owed the father and their father is freed from the care he owned his children.

The family that maintains itself only by means of convention, if they continue to remain

united and voluntarily.

Family is the prototype of political societies.

The leader is the image of the father.

The populance is the image of the children.

All are born equal and free so none give up their liberty except for their utility.



The difference between family and state is that in the family the love of the father for

his children repays him for the care he takes for them.

While state leader does not have love for his peoples, since the pleasure of commanding

takes the place of this feeling.

According to Philosopher Grotius he denies that all human power is established for the

benefit of the governed, like slavery.

And according to Caligula that kings were gods, or that the peoples were beast.

Also according to Hobbes the human race is divided into herds of cattle, each one

having its own leader who guards it in order to devour it.

While Aristotle view that men are by no means equal by nature, but that some were

born for slavery and others for domination.

CHAPTER III : ON THE RIGHT OF THE SRONGEST

Unless he transforms force into right and obedience into duty, the strongest is never

strong enough to be master all the time.

Force produces the right, the effect changes places with the cause.

Every force that is superior to the first succeeds to its right.

The strongest is always right, the only thing to do is to make oneself the strongest.

CHAPTER VI : ON THE SOCIAL COMPACT

Men cannot engender new forces, merely they unite and direct existing ones.

They have no other means of maintaining themselves but to form by aggregation a sum

of forces that could gain the upper hand over the resistance.

So that their forces are directed by a means of a single moving power and made to act in

concert.

Each man’s force and liberty are the primary instruments of his maintenance.



In giving himself to all, each person gives himself to no one. And since there is no

associate over whom he does not acquire the same right that he would grant others

over himself, he gains the equivalent of everything he loses, along with a greater

amount of force to preserve what he has.

If one eliminates from the social compact whatever is not essential to it, one will find

that it is reducible to the following terms.

Each of us places his person and all his power in common under the supreme direction

of the general will ; and as one we receive each member as an indivisible part of the

whole.

ALBERT CAMUS

Was born in French (1913-1960).

In a poor working-class family. He was a French journalist, novelist and philosopher who

fought in the French underground during World War II.

He fought for courage and integrity in public life.

He is most famous for his novels The Stranger (1942), The Plague (1947) and The Fall

(1957) under this he received a Novel Prize for literature.

He was killed in a car crash in 1960, his rival existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre, fittingly

called it “an absurd death”.

Camus life overall assessment is absurd and meaningless.

Life is compared to the

ABSURDITY AND SUICIDE

Suicide is ONE TRULY SERIOUS philosophical problem.

Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental

question of philosophy.

Many people die because they judge that life is worth living.

The meaning of life is the most urgent of questions. How to answer it.



Dying voluntarily implies that you have recognized, even instinctively, the ridiculous

character of that habit, the uselessness of suffering.

On all essential problems there are two methods of thoughts. The method of La Palisse

and the method of Don Quixote. The balance between evidence and lyricism can allow

us to achieve simultaneously emotion and lucidity.

The principle can be established that for a man who does not cheat, what he believes to

be true determine his action. Belief in the absurdity of existence must then dictate his

conduct.

It is the absurd and its contradictory life that teaches us. For the mistake is thinking that

quantity of experiences depends on the circumstances of our life when it depends solely

on us.

THE MYTH OF SISYPHUS

Sisyphus was the wisest and most prudent of morals, according to Homer.

According to other tradition, he was disposed to practice the profession of highwayman.

He is accused of certain levity in regard to the gods, He stole their secrets.

The gods had condemned Sisyphus to ceaselessly rolling a rock to the top of a mountain;

hence the stone would fall back of its own weight.

Sisyphus proletarian of the gods, powerless and rebellious, knows the whole extent of

his wretched condition. It is what he thinks of during his descent.

The lucidity that was to constitute his torture at the same time crowns his victory.

There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn.

He teaches the highest fidelity that negates the gods and raises rocks.

He too concludes that all is well.

The struggle itself towards the heights is enough to fill a man’s heart. So One must

imagine Sisyphus happy.



SIMONE DE BEAUVOIR

1. THE SECOND SEX

Our perspective is existentialist ethics.

That every subject concretizes itself as transcendence through projects; it achieves its

own freedom only through overtaking itself again by reaching for other freedoms.

Every time transcendence falls back into immanence, existence is degraded into in itself,

And freedom into facticity.

Every individual concerned to justify his or her existence experiences it as an undefined

urge to transcend himself or herself.

The peculiar to situation of woman is that. A woman is a free and autonomous being

like all humans.

A woman finds herself and chooses herself within a world where men compel her to

assume the status of the other.

A conflict between the fundamental demands of any subjectivity this is to affirm itself as

essential and the exacting requirements of her situation which a woman is constituted

as the inessential is woman’s drama.

2. HOW CAN THE PRESENT CONDITION OF WOMEN BE EXPLAINED?

(a) Biologically.

The more separate the female individual, the more imperiously does the continuity of

life assert itself against her separateness.

The female abdicates herself for the good of the species which demands this abdication.

(b) Historically.

Man would wish to dominate woman, but what advantage has enabled him to carry out

his will?

The reason is that mankind is not simply a natural species: it is not intent on maintaining

itself as species; its project is not stagnation, but self-transcendence.



Birth and suckling are not activities, they are natural functions; no project is involved.

That is why woman found in them no reason for a lofty affirmation of her existence –

she submitted passively to her biological fate.

Man’s case was radically different. Man provides for the group.

Not in the manner of worker bees by a simple vital process, through biological behavior,

but by means of acts that transcend his animal nature.

Man found self-realization as an existent, through acting he put his power to the test, he

set up goals and opened up roads toward them.

Early man’s activity had another dimensions that gave it supreme dignity, which often

dangerous.

The worst curse laid upon woman is, for it is not through giving life but through risking it

that we rise above the animal.

Which is why humanity has granted superiority not to the sex that gives birth but to that

which kills.

The Female is , to a greater extent that the male, prey to the species.

And the human race has always attempted to escape its specific destiny.

The support of life became, for man, action, a project, through the invention of the tool.

In maternity, woman remained closely bound to her body like an animal.

Humanity puts its own Being in question and because it values reasons for living above

mere life – that when he confronted woman, man assumed mastery.

(c) Institutionally and symbolically.

Should we regret matriarchy?

Man succeeded in mediating existence.

The male principle triumphed in both symbolic representations and in practical life.

Spirit prevailed over Life.

Transcendence over immanence.

Technology over magic.

Reason over superstition.



The devaluation of woman represents a necessary stage in the history of humanity.

Her prestige originated not from her own positive worth, but from man’s weakness.

Man escapes her control when he liberates himself from nature.

The reign of woman was bound to the reign of agriculture.

For woman was venerated only in so far as man made himself the slave of his own fears,

a party to his own impotence.

He worshipped her in terror and not in love. To become himself he had first to

dethrone her.

(d) Ontologically : woman posited as other.

Man never thinks “Self” without thinking “Other”, he view the world under the sign of

duality.

For the male it is always another male who is the fellow being, the Other who is also the

same, with whom reciprocal relations are established.

In truth, the Golden Age of Woman is only a myth.

That woman was the Other is to say that there did not exist between the sexes a

reciprocal relation.

Earth, Mother, Goddess – she was no fellow creature in man’s eyes.

It was beyond the human realm that her power was affirmed.

MIGUEL DE UNAMUNO

THE TRAGIC SENSE OF LIFE

For there is another thing which is also called man.

The man we have to do with is the man of flesh and bone, which is I, you, reader of

mine, the other man yonder, and all of us who walk solidly on earth.

This concrete man, this man of flesh and bone, is at once the subject.

The supreme object of all philosophy.

Philosophy lies closer to poetry than to science.

In philosopher, what must needs most concern us is the man.



Philosophy answers to our need of forming a complete and unitary conception of the

world and life. As a result of this conception, a feeling which gives birth to an inward

attitude and even to outward action.

The Critique of Practical Reason in strict fact is that the existence of God is therein

deduced from the immorality of the soul, and not the immorality of the soul from the

existence of God.

The man Kant felt that mortality was the basis of eschantology, but the professor of

philosophy inverted the terms….To be a man is to be something concrete, unitary, and

substantive, that it is to be a thing-res.

We will call the tragic sense of life, which carries with it a whole conception of life itself

and of the universe. A whole philosophy more or less formulated, more or less

conscious.

All knowledge has an ultimate object.

And the most tragic problem of philosophy is to reconcile intellectual necessities with

the necessities of the heart and the will.

Man by the very fact of being man, of possessing consciousness, is in comparison with

the ass or the crab, a diseased animal. Where consciousness is a disease.

Among men of flesh and bone there have been typical examples of those who possess

this tragic sense of life. Like Marcus Aurelius, St. Augustine, Pascal, Rousseau, Rene,

Obermann, Thomson, [9] Leopardi, Vigny, Lenau, Kleist, Amiel, Quental, Kierkegaard.

They are men burdened with wisdom rather than with knowledge.

PHILOSOPHY Final Digest

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