The Ardusian Sense: The Worst of All Possible Worlds

The Philosophical Forum, 2011

Analysis, 2019

Some people claim that some instances of suffering are intrinsically bad in an impersonal way. If it were true, that claim might seem to count against virtue ethics and for consequentialism. Drawing on the works of Jason Kawall, Christine Swanton and Nietzsche, I consider some reasons for thinking that it is, however, false. I argue, moreover, that even if it were true, a virtue ethicist could consistently acknowledge its truth.

2016

REFLECTIONS ON EVIL ' O Nikos Psarros (Νίκος ΐ'αρρός) είναι καθηγητής φιλοσοφίας στο Ινστιτούτο Φιλοσοφίας του Πανεπιστημίου της Λειψίας.

ANQ: A Quarterly Journal of Short Articles, Notes and Reviews

Genealogy, 2021

The utopian notion that there is a time and place where perfect happiness exists is deeply rooted in Western thought and alienates people from life in the here and now. Happiness is perceived as the purpose of life. Moreover, happiness and suffering are presented as opposites that are contingent upon a person’s actions. For thousands of years, happiness and the avoidance of suffering have been presented as the motives behind every action, and the conceptual basis for this still exists in contemporary discourse and culture. The roots of this perception can be found, inter alia, in the culture’s religious texts. In this paper, we use the genealogical method to interrogate the religious and constitutive texts of Western culture and to examine the origins of the perception that happiness is the purpose of life and that it constitutes the opposite of suffering. The genealogical method enables us to deconstruct the causal relationship that lies at the core of this premise. Genealogy deals...

CLEaR, 2016

To handle physical, mental or existential pain, man resorts to medicine, psychology, religion, philosophy ... This issue has also been discussed by writers and painters of all epochs. Artists have the advantage though - using the language of art, they can reach the truth about human life which cannot be accessed in a different way.The departure point for the deliberations about suffering and the sense of debating about it by means of words and pictures is a poem by W. H. Auden “Musée des Beaux-Arts”, from which the title quotation is derived. Auden refers to P. Bruegel’s Landscape with the Fall of Icarus, which applies to Ovid. In this paper, besides the aforementioned works (Auden, Bruegel; Metamorphoses), other paintings by Bruegel as well as the prose by Z. Herbert The Passion of our Lord Painted by an Anonymous Hand from the Circle of Rhenish Masters are used, allowing one to reflect on suffering, on the language of art, on making sense of the work in the reception process, and ...

Review of Education, Pedagogy, and Cultural Studies, 2023

This article argues that hope is not an adequate affective response to dread. Indeed, hope and dread are more closely aligned than either critical or postcritical forms of educational philosophy would like to admit. The article proposes a shift from hope to joy as an under appreciated educational affect. To make this claim, the author pivots to Spinoza's emphasis on joy as an affect that increases one's potential to think and act in a world with others as a new starting point for education in dreadful times. The article also offers a Spinozian reading of Freire that unlocks the joyful dimensions of his work, especially through his reflections on laughter. In conclusion, a hopelessly joyful affective orientation is called for as a form of passionate educational experimentation with the potentiality of the world.

Philosophers have long argued over the nature of free-will; whether one is forced to enact a predetermined cosmic or biological mandate or whether one is free to truly determine their own destiny. Yet, regardless of the true state of external affairs, one can effectively live their life as if either proposition is correct. To internalize the notion of radical free will can be called existentialism, whereas the internalization of predeterminism labels one a fatalist. While it may be impossible to answer the ontological question of external free will, it is certainly possible to examine those lives who commit themselves to either form. Aside from the naturalists like Stephen Crane who trap their many Maggies in the bondage of biological happenstance, most modern fiction allows its characters the freedom to adopt an internalized stance on free will. The notion of existential responsibility weighs heavily in the pages of Julian Barnes’ novel The Sense of an Ending, with direct mention of Camus’ The Myth of Sisyphus included in the immortalized quote “suicide [is] the only true philosophical question” (Barnes 15). The previously stated separation between fatalism and existentialism is not cast as a dichotomy within this paper, but as a continuum upon which the individual fluctuates. When one loses a clear sense of their personal freedom he naturally gravitates towards fatalism, for the world then begins to act upon him instead of him upon it. Likewise, one necessarily overcomes fatalism to reach a state of personal responsibility, rejecting the world’s existential pressure and internalizing a distinct purpose. Barnes’ protagonist, the “average” Tony who only wants “life not to bother” him, rides the rail between a man condemned to fate and one who moves with internal purpose. Defying the natural progression assumed in the novel format, he peaks at the middle and declines into despair, discontent that his weak attempts at redemption and purpose fall short. He represents a realistic existential portrayal, one detached from the pristine perfection that an Absurd hero like Sisyphus embodies. While Camus asserts that “one must imagine Sisyphus happy,” that the eternal struggle against meaninglessness is enough in itself to fuel a man’s continued existence, Tony demonstrates that this is only truly applicable in theory (Camus 78). The mythic Sisyphus can accept radical responsibility for his actions and live in joyful rebellion, but Tony cannot help but succumb to guilt, crippling remorse, and the shackles of external responsibility, beaten down by his failed reconciliation and inability to, until the end of the novel, make sense of the events surrounding him.

Camus’ Meursault and Sophocles’ Antigone are both characters in literature who act in ways that require them to deliberately confront their own mortality. In both cases, their actions lead to their executions, requiring that they struggle with the meaning and fear of death. ese two cases raise issues of hope, acceptance of the truth of the human condition, and the question of what di erence human action can make given the inevitability of death. I propose to examine both examples as a way of working through two possible stories of death. To set a frame, I begin with Hannah Arendt’s description of the fundamental levels of human activity and the di erent relation each activity has to death.

The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 1981

This chapter explores classical Mediterranean thought on suffering through a detailed examination of one Greek tragedy, Sophocles' Philoctetes, in which both moral philosophy and medicine also feature. Suffering in this play has no inherent metaphysical or ethical status, but it does raise the rather practical as well as ethical question of how other human beings can and should respond to the sufferer-examining in close detail how an individual's acute suffering deforms his everyday life and his relationships with his or her community and showing how very differently individuals respond to the suffering of others. It even asks the proto-Utilitarian question of whether the suffering of a single individual should be allowed to outweigh the interests of the whole community. There is perhaps no other artwork that explores so intensely the problem which incurable suffering presents to the community to which the sufferer belongs.

South African journal of philosophy, 2009

Epicurus argued that death can be neither good nor bad because it involves neither pleasure nor pain. This paper focuses on the deprivation account as a response to this Hedonist Argument. Proponents of the deprivation account hold that Epicurus's argument fails even if death involves no painful or pleasurable experiences and even if the hedonist ethical system, which holds that pleasure and pain are all that matter ethically, is accepted. I discuss four objections that have been raised against the deprivation account and argue that this response to Epicurus's argument is successful once it has been sufficiently clarified.