Philo11-BIG QUIZ(political, idealism, existentialism)

• Political Philosophy

  • Politics
  • Liberty
  • Justice
  • Property
  • Rights
  • Law
  • The enforcement of a legal code by authority
• Political Philosophers

  1. Thomas Hobbes
  2. John Locke
  3. Montesquieu
  4. Jean jacques Rousseau
  5. Karl Marx
  6. Friedrich Engels
  7. John Stuart Mill
  8. Jeremy Benthman
  9. James Mill
• Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury


  English philosopher
• Thomas Hobbes


  • Known for his work on political philosophy
  • Founder of modern political philosophy and political science
  • Developed fundamentals of European Liberal Thought
• Leviathan


  Book written by Thomas Hobbes in 1651 that established social contract theory
• Leviathan established the foundation of most later western political philosophy
• Thomas Hobbes' political philosophy

  • The right of the individual
  • Natural equality of all men
  • Artificial character of the political order leads to distinction between civil society and the state
  • All legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people
  • Liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid
• John Locke

  • English Philosopher and Physician
  • most influential of Enlightenment thinkers
  • Father of Liberalism
  • First British Empiricist
  • political theory was founded on social contract theory
  • postulated that at birth, the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa
  • first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness
  • we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception
• John Locke

  • Theory of mind- cited as origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau, and Kant
  • advocated governmental separation of powers
  • believed that revolution is not only a right but an obligation in some circumstances
  • believed that human nature allowed people to be selfish
  • man in natural state were equal and independent, and everyone had natural right to defend his "Life, health, liberty, or possessions"
• Montesquieu

  • (full name) Charles-Louis de Secondat, Baron de La Brede et de Montesquieu
  • French lawyer
  • man of letters
  • political philosopher who lived during the Age of Enlightenment
  • famous for his theory of separation of powers - implemented in many constitutions throughout the world
  • known for doing more than any other author to secure the place of the word despotism (dictatorship) in political lexicon
• Jean Jacques Rousseau

  • first man who fenced in a piece of land "This is mine"
  • "Beware of listening to this impostor"
  • "uncorrupted morals" prevails in the " state of nature"
  • "Nothing is so gentle as man in his primitive state, when placed by nature at an equal distance from the stupidity of brutes and the fatal enlightenment of civil man "
• Jean Jacques Rousseau

  • you are undone if you once forget that the fruits of the earth belong to us all, and the earth itself to nobody.
  • by joining together into civil society through the social contract and abandoning their claims of natural right, individuals can both preserve themselves and remain free.
  • looked to a hypothetical state of nature as normative guide
• Karl Marx


  Philosopher, economist, sociologist, journalist, and revolutionary socialist
• Marxism


  Theories about society, economics and politics
• Karl Marx: '"the first great user of critical method in social sciences"'
• Marx's view on metaphysics

  He criticized speculative philosophy, equating metaphysics with ideology
• Karl Marx

  "the fact that man is a corporeal, actual, sentient, objective being with natural capacities mean that he has actual, sensuous object for his nature as objects of his life-expression or that he can only express his life in actual sensuous objects"
• Karl Marx

  The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles
• Friedrich Engels

  • German Philosopher
  • Journalist
  • Social Scientist
  • Businessman
  • founded Marxist theory together with Karl Marx
• John Stuart Mill

  • English Philosopher
  • Philosopher of Liberalism
  • political economist and civil servant
  • most influential thinkers in the history of liberalism
  • contributed widely to social theory, political theory, and political economy
  • "the most influential English speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century"
  • proponent of utilitarianism
  • contributed to the theory of the scientific method
  • First member of Parliament to call for a women's suffrage
  • believed that " equality of taxation" meant " equality of sacrifice"
• Jeremy Bentham


  English philosopher, jurist, and social reformer
• Utilitarianism

  Modern utilitarianism founded by Jeremy Bentham
• Jeremy Bentham: '"it is the greatest happiness of the greatest number that is the measure of right and wrong"'
• Jeremy Bentham

  • Leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law
  • Political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism
• Beliefs and advocacy of Jeremy Bentham

  • Individual and economic freedom
  • Separation of church and state
  • Freedom of expression
  • Equal rights for women
  • Right to divorce
  • Decriminalizing of homosexual acts
  • Abolition of slavery
  • Abolition of the death penalty
  • Abolition of physical punishment, including children
  • Early advocate of animal rights
  • Opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them "nonsense upon stilts"
• James Mill

  • Father of John Stuart Mill
  • British historian, economist, political theorist, and philosopher
  • History of British India- complete denunciation and rejection of indian culture and civilization
  • counted among the founders of Ricardian school
  • Divided Indian history into 3 parts: Hindu, Muslim, British
• Idealism - refers to group of philosophies which assert that reality, or reality as we can know it, is fundamentally a construct of the mind or otherwise immaterial
• Epistemologically - idealism manifests as a skepticism about the possibility of knowing any mind-independent thing
• sociological sense- idealism emphasizes how human ideas - especially beliefs and values - shape society
• as an ontological doctrine - idealism goes further, asserting that all entities are composed of mind or spirit
• Idealism thus rejects physicalist and dualist theories that fail to ascribe priority to the mind
• Solipsism - extreme version of idealism
• Idealist Philosophers

  1. Immanuel Kant
  2. Johann Gottlieb Fichte
  3. Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling
  4. Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
  5. Arthur Schopenhauer
  6. Francis Herbert Bradley
• Immanuel Kant

  • German Philosopher- central figure of modern philosophy

  He argued that

  • human mind creates the structure of human experience
• Immanuel Kant

  • German Philosopher- central figure of modern philosophy

  He argued that

  • human mind creates the structure of human experience
  • reason is the source of morality
  • aesthetics arises from faculty of disinterest judgment
  • space and time are forms of our sensibility
  • world as it is "in-itself" in unknowable
• Immanuel Kant beliefs

  • metaphysics
  • epistemology
  • ethics
  • political theory
  • aesthetics
• Immanuel Kant idea of freedom 


  "everything that is possible through freedom"
• Immanuel Kant's Categories of freedom

  • (i) to be free
  • (ii) to be understood as free
  • (iii) to be morally evaluated
• Immanuel Kant in the chapter of "Analytic Of the Beautiful" of the critique of Judgment 


  -beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure that attends the "free play" of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what is beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical"
• Johann Gottlieb Fichte

  • German Philosopher
  • founding figure of the philosophical movement German Idealism
  • insights into the nature of self-consciousness or self-awareness
  • originator of thesis-antithesis-synthesis - idea that is often erroneously attributed to Hegel
  • motivated by the problem of subjectivity and consciousness
  • has a reputation as one of the fathers of German Nationalism