The soul, according to Aristotle
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
In the work De Anima, Aristotle presents his account of the soul. He sees the soul as inexorably tied to a physical body. This is because the soul is a form, while the body is the matter that is acted upon. Inherent in this characterization of the soul is the idea that the soul is actuality while...
Myths of origin: Their role in religion and society
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
What is myth? For rationalists such as Muller, they provide pre-scientific explanations of natural phenomena. For functionalists such as Malinowski they are a "codification of belief", explaining rites and justifying norms. For Jung, myth provides expressions of a collective unconscious. (i.e....
Liberalism: What are the main concepts of liberalism?
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Liberalism is a philosophy, or political movement that has, for an aim, the development of individual freedom. Since the concept of freedom evolved over time, liberalism evolved as well. However, some core assumptions never changed. First, let us consider how all the core concepts of liberalism...
What was 'Tito's way', and how successful was it?
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
Looking back at the time after the end of communism (Cuba and today's China being particular and Chavez not a communist), we basically find only three different ways of communism; the original one, the Lenino-Stalinism in the USSR, the latter one, China's Maoism, and finally the...
What is the relation (if any) between virtue and human flourishing?
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
When you shout at a passer-by in the street, and ask him what would be the most important goal in his life, he is likely to answer, like a majority of people that he wants to live happily. Then, we should raise the question: how could we achieve this happiness? More than two thousand years ago,...
Fascism, communism and totalitarianism
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Fascism was the first mass-mobilizing development dictatorship that provided a frank, complete, and relatively coherent rationale for totalitarianism." Actually, Mussolini's doctrine of delayed industrialization was the first to openly affirm the reality of production and the...
France and the United States: Two different approaches to feminism
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Feminism is defined by the Cambridge dictionary as the belief that women should have the same economic, social, and political rights as men . However, there is not a single definition for feminism. This notion is rather complex and controversial, and it cannot be fully comprehended in...
The universal human rights concept and its roots in Western political thought
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Commitment to the idea of cultural relativism is usually seen as precluding the acceptance of the idea of universal human rights. But is relativism against universalism a false dichotomy? Can we construct a differentiated universalism or a non-ethnocentric universalism?...
The Australian Strine
Essay - 17 pages - Philosophy
Having spent my eight-month-stay between Sydney and Brisbane, respectively State capitals of New South Wales and Queensland, sharing Australians' life, and having also travelled a bit to other cities and States of the East Coast, I feel I must share my affection for this vast, exciting...
The rise of the Ku Klux Klan in North Carolina
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
The original idea of the Ku Klux Klan was born in the late 1865, in the minds of six young men -John Lester, James Crowe, John Kennedy, Richard Reed, Frank Mc Cord and Calvin Jones- in the quiet town of Pulaski, Tennessee. They were Confederate soldiers during the Civil War and were bored with...
The role of NGO's during wartime: humanitarian vs pacifist ideals
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Since the beginning of modern humanitarian action during wartime (with the birth of the ICRC), the question of the NGOs' role on the battlefields has been the subject of an important controversy, opposing humanitarian to pacifist ideals. Indeed, pacifists' main point was to denounce the...
Action is character, FS Fitzgerald
Essay - 3 pages - Philosophy
In real life, what we do is supposed to reflect our personality. What we are - to the others - is first and foremost what we do and what we look like : we are judged by the others through the prism of our physical appearance and of our own behavior. Doing something "reprehensible" according to...
Moral and Overman - Study based on: Twilight of the Idols, or How to Philosophize with a Hammer By Friedrich Nietzsche
Essay - 8 pages - Philosophy
There are more idols than realities in the world. [ ] This time it is not contemporary idols but eternal idols that are being touched here with the hammer as if with a turning fork. This revaluation of all values, an expression that Nietzsche would use numerous times...
Are forgiveness and a search for the truth a better solution to heal the minds and bodies of the victims of wars than externally imposed tribunals? - published: 15/01/2009
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
Even after a settlement is reached and a peace agreement is signed, this is by no means the end of the conflict. For a conflict to really end, healing the minds and the bodies of the victims of wars are necessary. Indeed it is the necessary first step to reconciliation to appear and people who...
How can MacIntyre claim that some traditions, but not others, can escape the problem of incommensurability in their moral reasoning?
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
From the moment we abandoned Aristotle's teleology, MacIntyre believes, there has been no proper moral philosophy, but only philosophers "working ... with bits and pieces of philosophies which are detached from their original pre-Enlightenment settings in which they were comprehensible and...
Judaism and Rechtsstaat
Essay - 4 pages - Philosophy
The modern political philosophy, influenced by the Enlightenment and the ideal of individual liberty developed by Locke, considers that the political sphere must be independent from the religious sphere. In Israel, this separation between the State and the religion is not so clear. The...
Medieval Renewal: The Pre-Raphaelites' Quest for the Holy Grail and Arthurian Legends
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
The Holy Grail is usually considered to be the cup from which Christ drank at the Last Supper and the one used by Joseph of Arimathea to catch his blood as he hung on the cross. This significance was introduced into the Arthurian legends. In earlier sources and in some later ones, the Grail is...
Alterglobalisation: "Another world is possible?"
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
In the mid-eighties there were huge criticisms caused by the liberal policy carried out both by Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher. There were, especially in the United Kingdom, a lot of strikes and manifestations against the neo-liberalism. However, Margaret Thatcher, answering to an interview...
Second Life
Essay - 2 pages - Philosophy
Last time, we listened to a presentation on YouTube and the various problems raised by this website. Today, the subject is as topical as YouTube and we stay on the Web, because we are going to talk about another website called Second Life.Created in 2003 by Linden Lab, it became famous a year...
Propaganda is necessary for the functioning and survival of human society. Discuss
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
Propaganda, by whatever name we may call it, has become a very general phenomenon in the modern world. Differences in political regimes matter little; differences in social levels are more important; and most important is national self-awareness.(1) Actually, propaganda is a large...
Issues in and around Liberal Theory: What is Liberalism?
Essay - 7 pages - Philosophy
In this essay I shall propose a theory about what liberalism is. Dworkin's project is here clearly exposed. And, as most political thinkers when they try to define a coherent theory at the fundaments of actual political movements, I face an immediate problem. My project supposes...
Assess why the era of embedded liberalism (1945-1974) came to an end
Essay - 6 pages - Philosophy
One of the most important events of the 1970s was the end of the era of embedded liberalism; it brought about a change in the world order. Embedded liberalism was weakened, if not undermined, not by neo-protectionism, but by neo-liberalism (Adrian Jones 2005). Neo-liberalism entails heightened...
Globalisation and peace in the twenty-first century: a structuralist approach
Thesis - 15 pages - Philosophy
In his Glance at today's world (1931), French poet Paul Valéry wrote "Le temps du monde fini commence" (1). By "monde fini", he meant that the world now had well-established geographical limits, implying there was no more Terra incognita or utopia where to transpose our dreams, either in...
Roma Housing in the Czech Republic
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
The English documentary Gypsies, tramps and thieves? realised by Kate Blewett and Bryan Woods in 1999 notably shows a Roma young mother who lives in revolting conditions in a single room shared with twenty-three other Roma. We can see them piled up in a very small space. The toilettes...
Was Arendt's pessimism about modern liberal society justified?
Thesis - 7 pages - Philosophy
Hannah Arendt was born in 1906 in Germany, being the only child of middle-class Jewish parents of Russian descent. As a university student, she was one of the most brilliant and studied with the finest scholars of the time. Arendt in 1933 left Germany for France, and was even interned there for a...
Mercantilism
Thesis - 4 pages - Philosophy
Mercantilism was both an economical policy and different theoretical ideas. It was typically a European phenomenon which reached its highest development in the seventeenth century. It slowly disappeared during the eighteenth century. Thus, mercantilism covered the period from the Renaissance to...
Patriarchal ideology, gender and media
Thesis - 5 pages - Philosophy
In a study carried out in the mid-70s, B. Miles (1975: pg.un) found that the proportion of men and women in situation comedies was nearly similar. However, the author points out that the gender roles and the humor could still be traditional and sexist'. Thus, what we need to study in order...
Late modern institutions and collective action
Essay - 8 pages - Philosophy
There is no phenomenon more central or germane to the future of collective action than the conflict ridden process of institutionalization. This leads to an inquiry into a number of approaches in this contribution. Where does the institutionalization process begin, as it weaves itself deeper and...
On Grace: A study of Aquinas and Luther's philosophies of grace
Essay - 5 pages - Philosophy
The theology of grace is one of the most widely argued topics in all of Christian doctrine. So heavily debated is it that nearly all of the great theologians and philosophers of Christianity have at some point argued their case regarding grace. Two of the leading thinkers of the Christian Faith,...
Even this simple paper is beautiful: American beauty as a philosophical primer
Thesis - 7 pages - Philosophy
An American Beauty, in the most literal of senses, refers to a breed of roses. The breed of roses first seen in the movie of the same name are most likely that breed. The appropriateness of that name is without question. The American Beauty is an aesthetically pleasing rose. It is, as the name...