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Dec 19, 2013 · Aristotle calls good habits excellences or virtues. Virtues of the mind are intellectual virtues; while virtues exemplified by a regular disposition to choose correctly are moral virtues. For Aristotle, wisdom is the most important intellectual virtue but moral virtue plays a special role in living well.
- Basic Ideas of Existentialism
- Sartre and Freedom
- Angst, Bad Faith, and Authenticity
- Problems For An Existential Ethics
- Other Existential Thinkers
- An Assessment
Could it be that all of the major ethical theories—deontology, utilitarianism, natural law, contract theory—-abstract to speak to an amorphous ethical reality? But perhaps precision in ethics is a chimera. The philosophers known as existentialists generally believed that all the major theories discuss thus far were mistaken—for precisely these reas...
The famous existentialist Jean-Paul Sartre( 1905 – 1980) was a philosopher, playwright, political activist, and social critic. The complexities and nuances of his philosophy are formidable, but Sartre’s philosophy best characterizes the unique features of an existential ethics. The key concepts in the Sartrean analysis of ethics are: freedom, angst...
According to Sartre, when we encounter freedom and realize its paradox, we experience angst or anxiety. This anxiety results from the grave difficulty we have in accepting total responsibility for our acts. We are alone in the world without any guidance or any eternal principles to inform and console us. Instead, we must create our own values; we a...
The most obvious problem for Sartre’s ethics is whether freedom exists to the extent that he supposed, or if it exists at all. And there are other difficulties. Consider again the Sartrean project. When acting in bad faith, we pretend that something controls our behavior. Now imagine individuals who live according to the moral principles with which...
Sartre’s could rely upon a God as the ultimate source of objective value, but Sartre was an atheist. For Kierkegaard, ethical principles have their place, but they are subservient to a God who can suspend them. Moreover, this God doesn’t always share our moral judgments or the dictates of our moral conscience. If that were the case, we would only n...
If we really do create values by freely choosing projects, then there is no way to distinguish good projects or actions from bad ones, other than to say some are freely chosen and some aren’t. But it just doesn’t seem true that our commitment to something makes it valuable. Nor does it seem true that our lack of commitment makes something worthless...
This article reviews and integrates recent theory and research on life stories as manifested in investigations of self-understanding, autobiographical memory, personality structure and change, and the complex relations between individual lives and cultural modernity.
- Dan P. McAdams
- 2001
May 15, 2007 · One part of the field of life's meaning consists of the systematic attempt to clarify what people mean when they ask in virtue of what life has meaning. This section addresses different accounts of the sense of talk of “life's meaning” (and of “significance,” “importance,” and other synonyms).
Jan 6, 2023 · Insofar as we let others decide our lives for us, we live a life that is bereft of passion, a life of “bloodless indolence,” where we are unwilling or unable to “make a real commitment.” (Kierkegaard 1846 [1946, 266–67]).
Jun 1, 2023 · Existentialism is an approach to philosophy that focuses on the questions of human existence, including how to live a meaningful life in the face of a meaningless universe. Many thinkers and...
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Feb 12, 2022 · I offer an overview of the book, Death, Immortality, and Meaning in Life, summarizing the main issues, arguments, and conclusions (Fischer 2020). I also present some new ideas and further developments of the material in the book.
