Answer to Question 1
- Sren Kierkegaard founded his philosophy on a passionate though highly personal belief in God. This Danish philosopher challenged much of Christian philosophy while remaining deeply religious. Kierkegaard argued that life has meaning only when people reject the pursuit of pleasure and seek moral truth by looking within and recognizing their connection to the divine. Valued the single individual over the dehumanizing crowd.
- Friedrich Nietzsche was an equally passionate atheist who announced that God is dead. For Nietzsche, all of life is governed by a primal force, the will to powerthe will to grow, spread, seize, become predominantthat is manifest in all living things. The will to power finds its highest expression in humankind in our universal desire to control others and impose our values on them. Thus the ultimate moral good is an individual's striving to exert his or her will to power to the fullest possible extent.
Answer to Question 2
- Hedonism: The view that pleasure is the only thing truly of value. Some hedonists emphasize the higher pleasures such as intellectual pursuits.
- The term hedonism is derived from the Greek root hedone, which means pleasure.
- Early hedonists included Aristippus and Epicurus.
- Jeremy Bentham expanded this idea to psychological hedonism: The view that all human desire is necessarily directed to achieving pleasure and avoiding pain.
- Bentham advocated ethical hedonism: The moral view that human desire and action ought to be directed to achieving pleasure and avoiding pain.
Two views of the phylogenetic relationship between Neandertals and modern H. sapiens.
Primary visual processing areas (blue) in (a) human (lateral and mesial views) and (b) chimpanzee.
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).
Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855).
Contrast of ventilation and external and internal respiration.
Views of Earth’s Layered Structure