DE Weekly: Values, Moral Relativism, & Existential Ethics
Last week, I introduced Emmanuel Levinas, the twentieth-century French philosopher who posited ethics as “first philosophy.” To him, this meant that the force fundamentally underpinning all of philosophy is our ethical responsibility.
Before anything else, Levinas argued, we are first of all called into existence to be unconditionally obligated to serve others. Our first act as a Self, then, should be to consider the Other.
DE Weekly: Spinoza, Rationalism, & Determinism
“There can be no hope without fear, and no fear without hope.” These words belong to Baruch Spinoza, a philosopher of the Dutch Golden Age in the seventeenth century. What Spinoza meant by this is that, as we project our future, our hope for something carries with it inherently the risk of losing it. Such is the fundamental nature of our will. But why is our will like this?
Today, we’ll discuss Spinoza’s unique brand of rationalism and determinism, as well as his personal spirituality which informed his philosophy.