Philosophy

In 1789, Jeremy Bentham founded Utilitarianism, a theory of ethics that focused on quantifying benefits and harms. His ideas were influential in the development of modern utilitarianism and consequentialism. According to him, every action should be judged by its...

Utilitarianism, derived from Jeremy Bentham’s idea of utility, means that the correct moral decision is the one that brings about the greatest happiness or benefit to everyone. There is nothing absolute about this theory, and many different interpretations exist. For...

The concept of “freedom” as the freedom of individuals, so long as it does not harm anyone else, was taken almost as a given until the mid-20th century. But in his 1958 book, "Two Concepts of Liberty", Isaiah Berlin explains that what we usually call “liberty” is...

After the American and French Revolutions, there were many attempts at political reform, starting with the United States Declaration of Independence in 1776 and the French Revolution in 1789. These include freedom from slavery, right of self-determination, freedom of...

The Enlightenment period was dominated by French and British philosophies yet the German philosophers gained popularity only from the late 1780s. German philosophers were pioneers in thinking about the relationship between mind and body. Immanuel Kant – one of the...

Immanuel Kant was a rational philosopher. He claimed that, after reading David Hume (who wrote about reason and cause) and realizing that science was growing, he had awakened from the ‘dogmatic slumbers’ of rationalism. He wanted to reconcile the apparent opposition...

In his work, The Critique of Pure Reason, Kant distinguished between the noumenal world and the phenomenal world. He argued that the physical world is experienced through our senses and that our sensations give us knowledge of objects. However, he explained that the...

Immanuel Kant developed his ideas of transcendental idealism into a comprehensive system of thought that included epistemology (the study of knowledge), metaphysics (the nature of reality), and ethics (moral philosophy). He saw his moral philosophy as a response to...

Kant’s idealism was developed further by Johann Gottlieb Fichte. He admired Kant, yet dismissed the concept of noumenon or the thing-in-itself, and instead proposed a system of absolute idealism. Based on the theory of phenomenon and noumenon, Fichte argued that if we...

German romanticism was born out of the belief that all natural processes were divinely inspired, and therefore should be treated with reverence and awe. Their focus was on nature, and what we could learn about ourselves through observation of nature. The idea of...