MF 24： Meditation on death

The ultimate form of this premeditation of evils is the meditation on death. The meditation on death is found in Plato, in the Pythagoreans. Death  is not just a possible event; it is a necessary event. It is not just an event of some gravity: for man it has absolute gravity. And death may occur at any time, at any moment. So it is for this event, as the supreme misfortune if you like, that we must prepare ourselves, through which this premeditation of evils will be brought to its highest point.

In Stoics, the exercise consists in thinking death as present and one is living one's last day.
Seneca, Letter 12: the whole of life is only one long day with morning, which is childhood, midday, which is maturity, and evening, which is old age; that a year is also like a day, with the morning of spring and the night of winter; that each month is also like a sort of day; and that all in all a day, the passing of a single day, is the model for the organization of the time of a life, or of different organized times and durations in a human life. Living one's life as if not just a month or a year, but the whole of his life passes by in that day. We should think of each hour of the day we are living as a sort of age of life, so that when we arrive at the evening of the day we will also arrive at the evening of life as it were, that is to say at the moment of death itself. This is the exercise of the last day. It involves organizing and experiencing our day as if each moment of the day was the moment of the great day of life, and the last moment of the day was the last moment of our existence.

Marcus Aurelius: Moral perfection involves living each day as if it were the last.

Epictetus: Don't you know that illness and death must take us in the middle of some activity? They take the laborer at his work, the sailor navigating. And what activity would you like to be engaged in when you are taken? For you will be doing something when death takes. If you can be taken, while engaged in something better than our present activity, practice that.

Seneca: On the moral progress I have been able to make in the course of my life, I trust only in death. I await the day when I will pass judgment on myself and know whether virtue was only in my words or really in my heart. Whether or not you have wasted your time will be revealed when you lose your life.

The exercise, thinking about death, is only a means for taking this cross-section view of life which enables one to grasp the value of the present, or again to carry out the great loop of memorization, by which one totalizes one's life and reveals it as it is.

Pythagoras's examination of conscience at the end of each day to purify the thought before sleep. The dream is the test of the soul's purity.

Murcus Aurelius's morning examination: remembering the general aim you set yourself by these actions and the general aims you should always have in mind throughout life, and so the precautions to be taken so as to act according to these precise objectives and general aims in the situations that arise.

Epictetus: We should always have ready at hand the judgment of which we feel the need; at table, we should have ready at hand the judgment concerning everything to do with eating; at the bath, we should have ready at hand all the judgments concerning how to behave at the bath. When we are in bed, we should always have ready at hand all the judgments concerning how to behave in bed. To practice philosophy is to make preparation. To practice philosophy is to put oneself in a frame of mind such that one will regard the whole of life as a test. And the meaning of ascetics, the set of exercises available to us, is that of enabling us to be permanently prepared for this life which will only ever be, until its end, a life test in the sense that it will be a life that is a test.

For the Greek, caring about the self means equipping ourselves for a series of unforeseen events by practicing a number of exercises which actualized these events with an unavoidable necessity and in which we strip them of any imaginary reality they may have, in order to reduce their existence to the strict minimum. It is in these exercises, in the interplay of these exercises, that we will be able to live existence as a test throughout our life.

Michel Foucault

Michel Foucault: The Hermeneutics of the Subject

Michel Foucault (10/15/1926-6/25/1984), a preeminent philosopher of France in the 70s and 80s, taught at the College de France from January 1971 until his death. His title there was "The History of Systems of Thought."

Major writings:

Descartes

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rene_Descartes

Rene Descartes (3/31/1596-2/11/1650, aged 53) was a French philosopher, mathematician, physicist, and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the "Father of Modern Philosophy", and much of subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which continue to be studied closely to this day. In particular, his Meditations on First Philosophy continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments.

Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, and Hume.

His most famous statement is "Cogito ergo sum" (French: Je pense, donc je suis; English: I think, therefore I am), found both in Discourse on the Method and Principles of Philosophy.

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been proven unreliable. So Descartes concludes that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a thinking thing. Thinking is his essence as it is the only thing about him that cannot be doubted. Descartes defines "thought" (cogitatio) as "what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which he is immediately conscious.

20th Century Philosophy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/20th_century_philosophy
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Contemporary_philosophy

19th Century Philosophy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/19th_century_philosophy

With the tumultuous years of 1789-1815, European culture was transformed by revolution, war and disruption. By ending many of the social and cultural props of the previous century, the stage was set for dramatic economic and political change. European philosophy reflected on, participated in, and drove, many of these changes.

Philosophical schools and tendencies:
German idealism: Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Arthur Schopenhauer

Utilitarianism: In early 19th century Britain, Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill promoted the idea that actions are right as they maximize pleasure and minimize pain.

Marxism: Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels.

Existentialism: Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche

Positivism: Auguste Comte. the view that the rigorous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge.

Pragmatism: The American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James developed the pragmatist philosophy in the late 19th century.

British idealism: a revival of interest in the works of Kant and Hegel.

Transcendentalism: rooted in Immanuel Kant's transcendence and German idealism, lead by Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau. The main belief was in an ideal spiritual state that 'transcends' the physical and empirical and is only realized through the individual's intuition, rather than through the doctrines of established religions.

18th Century Philosophy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Age_of_Enlightenment

The Age of Enlightenment. The Enlightenment is held to be the source of critical ideas, such as the centrality of freedom, democracy, and reason as primary values of society.

No brief summary can do justice to the diversity of enlightened thought in 18th-century Europe. Because it was a value system rather than a set of shared beliefs, there are many contradictory trains to follow. In his famous essay "What is Enlightenment?" (1784), Immanuel Kant described it simply as freedom to use one's own intelligence. More broadly, the Enlightenment period is marked by increasing empiricism, scientific rigor, and reductionism, along with increasing questioning of religious orthodoxy.

Important figures:

• Balthasar Bekker (1634–1698) Dutch, a key figure in the Early Enlightenment. In his book De Philosophia Cartesiana (1668) Bekker argued that theology and philosophy each had their separate terrain and that Nature can no more be explained from Scripture than can theological truth be deduced from Nature.
• Pierre Bayle (1647–1706) French. Literary critic known for Nouvelles de la république des lettres and Dictionnaire historique et critique, and one of the earliest influences on the Enlightenment thinkers to advocate tolerance between the difference religious beliefs.
• Cesare Beccaria Italian. Best known for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764).
• George Berkeley Irish. Philosopher and mathematician famous for developing the theory of subjective idealism.
• James Boswell (1740–1795) Scottish. Biographer of Samuel Johnson, helped established the norms for writing biography in general.
• Edmund Burke (1729–1797) Irish. Parliamentarian and political philosopher, best known for pragmatism, considered important to both liberal and conservative thinking.
• Dimitrie Cantemir (1673–1723) Romanian. Philosopher, historian, composer, musicologist, linguist, ethnographer, and geographer. He was a member of the Royal Academy of Berlin. His most important works were History of the Growth and Decay of the Ottoman Empire and Descriptio Moldavie.
• Marquis de Condorcet (1743–1794) French. Philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist who devised the concept of a Condorcet method.
• Denis Diderot (1713–1784) French. Founder of the Encyclopédie, speculated on free will and attachment to material objects, contributed to the theory of literature.
• Benjamin Franklin (1706–1790) American. Statesman, scientist, political philosopher, pragmatic deist, author. As a philosopher known for his writings on nationality, economic matters, aphorisms published in Poor Richard's Almanac and polemics in favour of American Independence. Involved with writing the United States Declaration of Independence and the Constitution of 1787.
• Joseph-Alexandre-Victor Hupay de Fuveau,(1746–1818), writer and philosopher who had used for the first time in 1785 the word "communism" in a doctrinal sense.
• Edward Gibbon (1737–1794) English. Historian best known for his Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire.
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe is closely identified with Enlightenment values, progressing from Sturm und Drang and participating with Schiller in the movement of Weimar Classicism.
• Johann Gottfried von Herder German. Theologian and linguist. Proposed that language determines thought, introduced concepts of ethnic study and nationalism, influential on later Romantic thinkers. Early supporter of democracy and republican self rule.
• Thomas Hobbes (1588–1679) English philosopher, who wrote Leviathan, a key text in political philosophy.
• Baron d'Holbach (1723–1789) French. Author, encyclopaedist and Europe's first outspoken atheist. Roused much controversy over his criticism of religion as a whole in his work The System of Nature.
• David Hume (1711–1776) Scottish. Historian, philosopher and economist. Best known for his empiricism and scientific scepticism, advanced doctrines of naturalism and material causes. Influenced Kant and Adam Smith.
• Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826) American. Statesman, political philosopher, educator, deist. As a philosopher best known for the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and his interpretation of the United States Constitution (1787) which he pursued as president. Argued for natural rights as the basis of all states, argued that violation of these rights negates the contract which bind a people to their rulers and that therefore there is an inherent "Right to Revolution."
• Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) German. Philosopher and physicist. Established critical philosophy on a systematic basis, proposed a material theory for the origin of the solar system, wrote on ethics and morals. Prescribed a politics of Enlightenment in What is Enlightenment? (1784). Influenced by Hume and Isaac Newton. Important figure in German Idealism, and important to the work of Fichte and Hegel.
• Gottfried Leibniz Inventor of Calculus as we know it today and wrote Protogea, amongst other scientific and philosophical works.
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729–1781) German. Dramatist, critic, political philosopher. Created theatre in the German language, began reappraisal of Shakespeare to being a central figure, and the importance of classical dramatic norms as being crucial to good dramatic writing, theorized that the centre of political and cultural life is the middle class.
• John Locke (1632–1704) English Philosopher.
• Montesquieu (1689–1755) French political thinker. He is famous for his articulation of the theory of separation of powers, taken for granted in modern discussions of government and implemented in many constitutions all over the world.
• Thomas Reid (1710–1796) Scottish. Presbyterian minister and Philosopher. Contributed greatly to the idea of Common-Sense philosophy and was Hume's most famous contemporary critic. Best known for his An Inquiry Into The Human Mind. Heavily influenced William James.
• Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712–1778) Swiss political philosopher. Argued that the basis of morality was conscience, rather than reason, as most other philosophers argued. 
• Adam Smith (1723–1790) Scottish economist and philosopher. He wrote The Wealth of Nations, in which he argued that wealth was not money in itself, but wealth was derived from the added value in manufactured items produced by both invested capital and labor. 
• Baruch Spinoza (1632–1677) Dutch, philosopher who is considered to have laid the groundwork for the 18th-century Enlightenment.  
• François-Marie Arouet (pen name Voltaire) (1694–1778) French Enlightenment writer, essayist, deist and philosopher. He wrote several books, the most famous of which is Dictionnaire Philosophique, in which he argued that organized religion is pernicious. He was the Enlightenment's most vigorous antireligious polemicist, as well as being a highly well known advocate of intellectual freedom.
• Mary Wollstonecraft (1759–1797) British writer, philosopher, and feminist.

17th Century Philosophy

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17th_century_philosophy

The Age of Reason or Age of Rationalism. In western philosophy, 17th century is considered the start of modern philosophy with the work of René Descartes.

Two schools of thought: the rationalists and the empiricists.

Three main rationalists: René Descartes, Baruch Spinoza, and Gottfried Leibniz. Building upon their English predecessor Francis Bacon.

Three main empiricists: Thomas Hobbes, John Locke, and George Berkeley.

17th Century Philosophers:

• Francis Bacon (1561-1626)
• Thomas Browne (1605-82)
• Mir Damad (d. 1631)
• Thomas Hobbes (1588-1679)
• Mulla Sadra (1571–1640)
• René Descartes (1596–1650)
• Blaise Pascal (1623-1662)
• Baruch Spinoza (1632-1677)
• Francisco Suárez (1548–1617)
• John Locke (1632–1704)
• Nicolas Malebranche (1638–1715)
• Isaac Newton (1642–1727)
• Gottfried Leibniz (1646–1716)
• Pierre Bayle (1647–1706)
• Damaris Cudworth Masham (1659–1708)
• Mary Astell (1666–1731)
• Galileo Galilei (1564-1642)
• John Milton (1608-1674)