Praise and Blame Joel Feinberg observed that “moral responsibility… is a subject about which we are all confused” (1970: 37). Perhaps nowhere is this confusion more evident than in our understandings of praise and blame. This entry will contrast three influential philosophical accounts of our everyday practices of praise and blame, in terms of how they might be justified. D'un côté, a broadly

Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) Nietzsche était un philosophe allemand, essayiste, et critique culturel. Ses écrits sur la vérité, moralité, langue, esthétique, théorie culturelle, histoire, nihilisme, pouvoir, conscience, et le sens de l'existence ont exercé une énorme influence sur la philosophie occidentale et l'histoire intellectuelle. Nietzsche parlait de « la mort de Dieu,» et prévoyait la dissolution de la religion traditionnelle et de la métaphysique. Certains interprètes de Nietzsche pensent qu'il a embrassé le nihilisme,

The Bhagavad Gītā The Bhagavad Gītā occurs at the start of the sixth book of the Mahābhārata—one of South Asia’s two main epics, formulated at the start of the Common Era (C.E.). It is a dialog on moral philosophy. The lead characters are the warrior Arjuna and his royal cousin, Kṛṣṇa, who offered to be his charioteer and who is also an avatar of the

Cynics Cynicism originates in the philosophical schools of ancient Greece that claim a Socratic lineage. To call the Cynics a “school” though, immediately raises a difficulty for so unconventional and anti-theoretical a group. Their primary interests are ethical, but they conceive of ethics more as a way of living than as a doctrine in need of explication. As such askēsis—a Greek word meaning a kind

Epiphenomenalism Epiphenomenalism is a position in the philosophy of mind according to which mental states or events are caused by physical states or events in the brain but do not themselves cause anything. It seems as if our mental life affects our body, et, via our body, the physical world surrounding us: it seems that sharp pains make us wince, it seems that fear makes

Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani (d. 1020) Hamid al-Din al-Kirmani was a prominent Ismaili missionary during the reign of the Fatimid caliph-imam al-Hakim (996-1021). He was of Persian origin and was probably born in the province of Kirman. He seems to have spent the greater part of his life as a Fatimid da‘i (missionary) in Iraq (in Baghdad and Basra) and in central and western parts of