2. Agree or disagree with the following:

1. Philosophical theory of the British empiricists led to objectivism.

2. Locke’s theory of simple and secondary ideas is inconsistent.

3. According to him, knowledge is the perception of agreement and disagreement of two ideas.

4. He maintains we have two kinds of knowledge: intuitive and sensitive.

5. And Berkeley didn’t do anything to end Locke’s inconsistency.

6. Foe Berkeley, there are only minds and their ideas.

7. Hume did nothing in the pursuit of theoretical consistency.

3. Look through the text and ask ten questions concerning the life story of Kant:

Immanuel Kant

Immanuel Kant (1724 – 1804) is generally considered the greatest of modern philosophers.

Throughout his whole life, Kant lived in or near Konigsberg, in East Prussia. His outer life was academic and wholly uneventful, although he lived through the Seven years’ War, the French Revolution, and the early part of Napoleon’s career. He was educated in the Wolfian version of Leibniz’s philosophy, but was led to abandon it by two influences: Rousseau and Hume, for Kant, was an adversary to be refuted, but the influence of Rousseau was more profound. Kant was a man of such regular habits that people used to set their watches by him as he passed their doors, but on one occasion his time-table was disrupted for several days; this was when he was reading “Emile”/ He said that he had to read Rousseau’s books several times, because at a first reading, the beauty of the style prevented him from noticing the matter. Although he had been brought up as a pietist, he was a Liberal both in politics and in theology, he sympathized with the French Revolution until the Reign of Terror, and was a believer in democracy. His philosophy allowed an appeal to the heart against the cold dictates of theoretical reason. His principle that every man is to be regarded as an end in himself is a form of doctrine of the Rights of Man: and his love of freedom is shown in his saying that ”there can be nothing more dreadful than that the actions of a man should be subject to the will of another”.

4. Complete the following sentences:

1. Philosophy of the eighteenth century was dominated by … .

2. In their temper in mind the British empiricists were … .

3. Locke says that we have three kinds of knowledge … .

4. Berkeley abolished physical external world at all by saying … .

5. Hume denied the Self and threw doubt on … .

5. Speak on the following points:

1. Philosophy of the eighteenth century.

2. Criticism of this philosophy by B. Russell.

Task 8

Read and translate the text

PHILOSOPHICAL SCHOOLS AND TENDENCIES

OF 19TH-CENTURY PHILOSOPHY

German idealism. One of the first philosophers to attempt to grapple with Kant's philosophy was Johann Gottlieb Fichte, whose development of Kantian metaphysics became a source of inspiration for the Romantics. In "Wissenschaftslehre", Fichte argues that the self posits itself and it is a self-producing and changing process.

Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, a student of Fichte, continued to develop many of the same ideas and was also assimilated by the Romantics as something of an official philosopher for their movement. But it was another of Fichte's students who would rise to become the most prominent of the post-Kantian idealists: Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.

Arthur Schopenhauer, rejecting Hegel, called for a return to Kantian idealism.

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. Bentham believed actions were right as they maximized an individual's pleasure, whereas Mill believed that one's actions were right or wrong depending on whether they maximized pleasure collectively.

Kierkegaard and Nietzsche. Existentialism as a philosophical movement is properly a 20th-century movement, but its major antecedents, Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche wrote long before the rise of existentialism. In the 1840s, academic philosophy in Europe, following Hegel, was almost completely divorced from the concerns of individual human life, in favour of pursuing abstract metaphysical systems. Kierkegaard’s criticism of Hegel was an appeal to the concrete as against the abstract. Kierkegaard sought to reintroduce to philosophy, in the spirit of Socrates: subjectivity, commitment, faith, and passion, all of which are a part of the human condition.

Like Kierkegaard, Nietzsche saw the moral values of 19th-century Europe disintegrating into nihilism (Kierkegaard called it the "levelling" process). Nietzsche attempted to undermine traditional moral values by exposing its foundations. To that end, he distinguished between master and slave moralities, and claimed that man must turn from the meekness and humility of Europe's slave-morality.

Both philosophers are precursors to existentialism, among other ideas, for their importance on the "great man" against the age. Kierkegaard wrote of 19th-century Europe, "Each age has its own characteristic depravity. Ours is perhaps not pleasure or indulgence or sensuality, but rather a dissolute pantheistic contempt for the individual man."

Positivism. Auguste Comte, the founder of modern sociology, put forward the view that the rigorous ordering of confirmable observations alone ought to constitute the realm of human knowledge. He had hoped to order the sciences in increasing degrees of complexity from mathematics, astronomy, physics, chemistry, biology, and a new discipline called "sociology", which is the study of the "dynamics and statics of society".

Other popular philosophical schools of 19^th century also were: pragmatism, marxism, British idealism, and transcendentalism.