Language and Philosophy

The Enlightenment was an intellectual movement in Europe during the 17th and 18th century. It introduced new ideas about nature, humanity, and God that inspired revolutionary developments in art, philosophy, and politics. Essentially, it was a celebration of the power of human reason . It challenged tradition, authority, and religion, and promoted the use of reason, critical thinking, and science to achieve knowledge and progress. Key Ideas 1. Reason and Science Reason was at the heart of the Enlightenment. The Enlightenment thinkers claimed that it was the key to understanding the world . Newton ’s success in capturing nature’s laws through mathematical equations strengthened their confidence in reason’s capacity to discover the laws of the universe—including those of human behavior. It also reinforced their conviction in science’s power to establish the truth, independent of tradition and divine revelation. Because reason can understand the world, the Enlightenment thinkers ar...

Utilitarianism is an ethical theory founded by Jeremy Bentham (1748-1832) and developed and popularized by John Stuart Mill (1806-1873). It is a form of consequentialist ethics and, as its name suggests, is founded on the principle of utility ; meaning, that property of  any object that tends to produce pleasure or happiness and prevents pain or unhappiness. The aim of utilitarianism is to maximize utility, or the happiness and well-being of all affected individuals. As such, for utilitarianism, an act is morally good if it produces the greatest happiness or pleasure to the greatest number of people , and bad if it produces more pain than pleasure to the greatest number of people .  This explains why utilitarians would not care if an action is done using dishonest means as long as it produces maximum benefits to the greatest number of people. Like in, for example, the famous case of Robin Hood. As is well known, Robin Hood steals properties from the rich and gives the...

Stoicism is a school of philosophy founded by Zeno of Citium in Athens around the 3rd century B.C. Its name comes from the ancient Greek “ stoa poikile ,” meaning "painted porch," which was a colonnade in Athens where the stoics taught philosophy. From Athens stoicism later on moved to Rome, where it flourished through the works of Cicero (106–43 B.C.), Seneca (c. 4 B.C.–65 A.D.), Epictetus (c. 50–135), and even the Roman emperor Marcus Aurelius (121–180), especially through his collected writings known as the Meditations . However, it declined during the 4th century, after Christianity became the state religion. Since then, stoicism has seen revivals, especially during the Renaissance and the 21st century. Stoicism is not a religion, but a philosophy meant to be applied to everyday living. It’s a type of eudaimonistic virtue ethics which claims that the practice of virtue is necessary and sufficient to achieve “eudaimonia” or happiness—an idea that definitely influenced r...

Postmodernism is an intellectual, cultural, and artistic movement that emerged in the mid-20th century. It is characterized by a rejection of the grand narratives of modernism, an emphasis on pluralism, fragmentation, and the deconstruction of established social and cultural structures, as well as an interest in popular culture, pastiche, and irony. At its core, postmodernism is a response to the failures of modernism, which sought to impose a single, universal truth or ideology on society. Modernism (late 19th–early 20th century) emphasized rationality, progress, and the enlightenment project. It was rooted in the belief that human beings could create a better world through the use of reason and technology. But the devastating impact of the Holocaust and World War II, as well as other social and political upheavals, revealed the limitations of modernism’s utopian vision. Postmodernism emerged as a reaction to this disillusionment. It offered a more skeptical, critical, and complex vie...