Philosophers to Know, Part II

René Descartes (1596–1650) is traditionally considered the father of modern philosophy for rejecting completely the worldview of Aristotelian Scholasticism and developing in its place a new science based on mechanistic principles, a new metaphysics based on an original form of mind-body (or mind-matter) dualism, a new epistemology based on methodical doubt (the systematic rejection of any belief that could conceivably be false), and the theory of innate ideas. Descartes was also a great mathematician, having invented the field of analytic geometry, a method of representing and solving algebraic problems geometrically and geometric problems algebraically. He is perhaps best known as the author of the famous phrase Cogito, ergo sum (Latin: “I think, therefore I am”), a version of which he used in his Meditations (1641) as a foundation of absolute certainty on which to reestablish human knowledge of the self (or mind), God, and the external (physical) world. Descartes’s metaphysical dualism, which recognized mind and matter as distinct and irreducible basic substances, gave rise to the modern mind-body problem, the challenge of explaining how mental phenomena can causally interact with physical states and events. His methodical doubt gave rise to the modern problem of other minds, the challenge of justifying one’s belief that others have mental lives similar to one’s own, among many other epistemological conundrums. And his conception of the mind as a repository of innate ideas gave rise to the philosophical school of rationalism and in the 20th century inspired scientific investigations of innate mental faculties and structures in cognitive science and theoretical linguistics.* During the last year of his life, Descartes served as tutor to the young Queen Christina of Sweden, who made him rise before 5 o’clock in the morning to give her lessons in philosophy. On his way to attend the queen on the morning of February 1, 1650, he caught a chill, and 10 days later he died of pneumonia.* Although Descartes never married, he fathered a child, Francine, by his housekeeper, Helena Jans, in 1635. The girl’s death of scarlet fever at the age of five was the greatest sorrow of Descartes’s life.* To avoid persecution by French religious authorities for his philosophical and scientific views, Descartes spent much of his adult life in the Netherlands. While there he lived alone, concealed his whereabouts, and moved frequently, living in 18 different places in 22 years.

For his total transformation of the enterprise of Western philosophy, Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) is generally regarded as the outstanding intellectual figure of the Enlightenment and the most important philosopher since Aristotle. Kant redefined the central task and basic methods of philosophy in a reorientation of the discipline that he aptly compared to the 16th-century shift in astronomy from the Ptolemaic (Earth-centered) to the Copernican (Sun-centered) model of the universe. His comprehensive and scientifically informed system, which encompassed metaphysics, epistemology, philosophy of mind, ethics, and aesthetics, synthesized the modern schools of rationalism and empiricism, overcoming the limitations of each; in so doing he decisively influenced the subsequent course of Western philosophy during the 19th and 20th centuries and beyond. Kant’s innovation was to propose as the basic problem of philosophy, to investigate the powers and limitations of human reason and, more broadly, to account for the possibility of substantive knowledge claims in science and morality by rooting them in the innate structures of the mind and in the nature of reason itself. In that project he arguably succeeded: Kantianism is a well-established philosophical tradition, and there are contemporary Kantians in almost every major field of philosophy.* Despite his status as a great thinker, Kant is generally regarded as one of the worst writers in the history of Western philosophy. The bad writing of his first major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781), resulted in what he considered a serious misinterpretation by critics and caused him to issue a second edition (1787), whose inconsistency with the first edition has resulted in a centuries-long debate about his original intentions.* Kant’s quiet life and regular habits eventually became an object of curiosity and derision. He was born and died in the same small Prussian town, Königsberg, and it was plausibly said of him that one could set one’s watch by the time he took his regular afternoon walk.* Kant credited the birth of his critical philosophy to the Scottish Enlightenment philosopher David Hume, whose radical empiricism, he said, awoke him from his “dogmatic slumber.”

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900) was a German philosopher, classicist, and cultural critic whose highly original and penetrating attacks on conventional Western philosophy, religion, and morality profoundly affected the development of European philosophy in the 20th century and influenced important figures in many other intellectual and artistic fields, including theology, psychology, history, literature, and music. His aphoristic, romantic, and often poetic style of writing and the undeniable artistic merit of his German prose contributed to the eventual popularity and influence of his thought. But his characteristically unsystematic and fragmentary philosophical reflections were easily misunderstood or oversimplified. After his death, aspects of his philosophy, especially his notion of the “will to power,” were misrepresented in grossly bowdlerized texts published by his sister, Elisabeth Förster-Nietzsche, who for her own purposes attempted to cast her brother as a prophet of German nationalism and anti-Semitism, a caricature that was enthusiastically adopted by cultural officials of the Nazi regime in the 1930s. In reality, Nietzsche abhorred both nationalism and anti-Semitism. Nietzsche is remembered for many other provocative but frequently misunderstood doctrines, including “slave morality,” the death of God, and the “superman” or Übermensch. * In his early academic career Nietzsche was recognized as a brilliant classical philologist. He was granted a doctorate by the University of Leipzig without dissertation or examination and was appointed to a chair at the University of Basel when he was only 24 years old.* In 1870, while serving as a medical orderly during the Franco-German War, Nietzsche contracted diphtheria and dysentery. He was thereafter in continual ill health, suffering migraine headaches, vomiting, and vision problems that forced his permanent retirement from teaching in 1879.* After collapsing in the street in Turin, Italy, in 1889, Nietzsche became completely and permanently insane. He spent the last 10 years of his life in mental darkness, first in an asylum and then in the care of his mother and sister. Various causes of his breakdown have been proposed, including tertiary syphilis and retro-orbital meningioma, a tumor on the surface of his brain behind his right eye.

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951) is by reputation one of the greatest philosophers of the 20th century, and even outside academia his name has become synonymous with philosophical genius. He was the creator of at least two (according to some interpreters, three) philosophies of enormous influence. His later thought in particular also influenced theoretical approaches in many related fields (including theology, psychology, and literary studies), and his unconventional lifestyle and mesmerizing personality inspired artists, novelists, poets, musicians, and filmmakers, among others. At the University of Cambridge (1911–13) he studied philosophy and logic under Bertrand Russell and became friends with G.E. Moore. Wittgenstein’s first major work, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1922), expounded the so-called picture theory, according to which meaningful propositions are literally “pictures” of the facts that they express. After serving as a school teacher in Austria in the 1920s, he returned to Cambridge in 1929. There his thought took a new direction, and by the mid 1930s he had developed a highly original view of language as essentially embedded in social activities and of philosophy as the therapeutic dispelling of conceptual confusions engendered by misunderstandings of the ways in which language is used in everyday life. On this approach, words and sentences derive their meanings from the roles they play in a myriad of “language games,” the infinitely numerous and complex social activities in which language is involved. His major works from this later period, all published posthumously, include Philosophical Investigations (1953) and On Certainty (1969). * Three of Wittgenstein’s four brothers committed suicide. * When Wittgenstein returned to Cambridge, he submitted the Tractatus as a dissertation in fulfillment of the doctoral degree. His oral examination was conducted by Russell and Moore, a ritual that both older philosophers regarded as absurd. Wittgenstein ended the discussion by telling his examiners, “Don’t worry, I know you’ll never understand it.” He was passed anyway.* Wittgenstein’s obsessive, neurotic, and domineering personality was well known and caused even some of his admirers, including Russell, to openly question his sanity. At a meeting of the Moral Sciences Club at Cambridge in 1946, Wittgenstein flew into a rage at a guest speaker, the eminent philosopher of science Karl Popper, and allegedly threatened him with a poker that he had pulled from a fireplace. According to one version of the story, violence was averted only after Russell ordered Wittgenstein to put the poker down.

Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) was the most important influence upon European continental (French and German) philosophy in the 20th century. He led the phenomenological movement, originally dedicated to the philosophical investigation of the phenomena of consciousness, in radically new directions, using its techniques to explore fundamental aspects of ontology (the philosophical study of being, or existence) and metaphysics, and he was a leading figure of 20th century existentialism. Later trends in continental philosophy, especially hermeneutics and deconstruction, owed much to his ideas, and his thought was widely influential in many disciplines outside philosophy, including theology, literary theory, psychology and psychotherapy, and cognitive science. Heidegger studied philosophy at the University of Freiburg, where he began teaching in 1915. He soon came under the influence of Edmund Husserl, the German founder of phenomenology, who joined the faculty in 1916. Being and Time (1927), Heidegger’s first major publication and the work for which he is best known, earned him an international reputation, notwithstanding the extreme obscurity of the text. The work is an investigation into the meaning of “Being” through a preliminary examination of the being of human individuals, which Heidegger called Dasein (“being-there”). Breaking with the tradition established by Descartes, Heidegger asserted that Dasein is a “Being-in-the-world”—a condition of already being caught up in, involved with, or committed to other individuals and things. In 1933 he became rector of Freiburg, and one month later he joined the Nazi Party. At the end of World War II he was banned from teaching (the ban was lifted five years later). He never disavowed his Nazi past, and indeed in a 1953 work, Introduction to Metaphysics, he repeated a remark from a 1935 lecture praising “the inner truth and greatness” of National Socialism. Scholars of Heidegger’s work subsequently debated whether his Nazism and apparent anti-Semitism were the regrettable errors of an otherwise great thinker or indicative of deeper flaws in his philosophy.* Several of Heidegger’s students became important thinkers in their own right. One of them, the political theorist Hannah Arendt, had an affair with the married Heidegger in the 1920s. Because of her Jewish heritage, she fled Germany after the Nazi takeover in 1933.* In 2014 the first three volumes of Heidegger’s so-called “black notebooks,” containing his private philosophical and political reflections, were published in Germany. They contained several overtly anti-Semitic passages woven into philosophical discussions, apparently lending support to the view that aspects of Heidegger’s philosophy were inherently fascistic.* Heidegger’s complete works, when finally published, will run to more than 100 volumes, making him one of the most prolific writers in the history of Western philosophy.