Essays on Philosophers

In the 17th century, political philosophy was widely practised as a discipline adhering to the psychological-realist school. Whereby, theories of governance and the state were theorised based on what humans are, not as what the state ‘wants them to be’ (Spinoza, Tractactus Politicus 1/1). The...

In Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals is a text that begs to be understood from some of the philosopher’s more well-known concepts including the categorical imperative, which is introduced in the book as a way of evaluating the motivations for individual action....

Beauty is a part of the human condition; we are attracted to what we find appealing and repelled by what we find unappealing. In the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, scholars captured this concept and put into words what it means to experience beauty. Immanuel Kant,...

Immanuel Kant’s deontological ethical theory, the Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, can be viewed from many different perspectives. As it is based on duty operating as a final good, the theory of utilitarianism (a moral theory concerned with actions in themselves) disputes main concepts...

The literary critics Alexander Pope and Immanuel Kant put critics to the test as they perform the task of critiquing critiques. In Pope’s Essay on Criticism, he provides the readers and critics with critique of critics in poetry form which in itself is a work...

The phenomenon of morality and its origination has been a topic of debate throughout history. Specifically, the world renowned philosophers, David Hume and Immanuel Kant, come to a very significant disagreement over the history of morality, the source of its origin, and its universality. But,...

Introduction Michel Foucault begins his essay “We ‘Other’ Victorians” with a description of what he calls the “repressive hypothesis” (Foucault, 1990, p. 10). This hypothesis holds that openly expressing sexuality at the beginning of the seventeenth century was considered shameless. Transitioning into the Victorian era...

The Communist Manifesto, written by Karl Marx and Fredrich Engels, has become one of the world’s most influential and significant pieces of political propaganda ever written. It contains the viewpoints and ideology of the world-view that Marx and Engels had come to know from their...

Both Karl Marx and Charles Darwin have proven themselves to be strong voices against the chorus in their respective fields, particularly in their quintessential works, The Communist Manifesto by Marx, and The Descent of Man by Darwin. Both writers are recognized as accomplished scientists, who...

As the authors of The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels are known as the initiators of communist and Marxist theories; many of their ideas are still at the heart of contemporary critiques of capitalism’s excesses. In their Manifesto, Marx and Engels famously predicted...

The trio of classic Greek texts, The Last Days of Socrates, Antigone, and The Eumenides all strike a contrast between public and private morality. In each work one person carries forth an unpopular action that he alone believes in, and must later justify the result...

In Robert Bolt’s A Man for all Seasons, Thomas More is a man whose sense of self is set in stone. He dies not because he wants to be martyred or made a hero, but because he finds himself unable to compromise his integrity. Throughout...