VANIA JANE R.

FELIX
BSBA

Thomas Hobbes, 1588 – 1679

Thomas Hobbes was born near Malmesbury, England, in 1588, the year that the Spanish
Armada approached nearest to the English coast. He claimed that the threatened attack prompted
his birth—“mother dear/ Did bring forth twins at once, both me and fear”—and moreover filled
him with a lifelong hatred for England’s enemies and a corresponding love of peace and study.
Hobbes spent his adult life alternating between Paris and London, avoiding as best he could the
tumult of the “ill times”: the English Civil Wars and the prominence of radical political-religious
groups, the beheading of Charles I, and the Protectorate of Oliver Cromwell. Continually
embroiled in controversy, and sometimes threatened with prosecution and death, Hobbes
remarkably survived to the exceptional age of 91.
Hobbes’s family was undistinguished; his father was the vicar of a small parish, but was
forced to flee town after engaging in a fight in front of his own church. Hobbes’s education was
financed by a wealthier uncle, Francis Hobbes, who arranged for private schooling and who
underwrote Hobbes’s education at the University of Oxford (Magdalen Hall), beginning at age
fourteen. Although Hobbes excelled at Greek and Latin as a young student, he left no mark at
Oxford. Hobbes wrote that he spent much of his time there learning Aristotelian physics and
logic, and that he afterward “dispensed” with these, to “prove things after [his] own sense.”
Shortly after taking his degree, Hobbes became engaged as a tutor to the Cavendish
family, with whom he maintained a close connection for the rest of his life. Hobbes was first
hired to serve as a tutor and companion to William Cavendish, later the Second Earl of
Devonshire, and subsequently taught William’s son and grandson. In 1610, Hobbes and his first
charge embarked on a grand tour of the continent, traveling primarily to France and Italy.
Hobbes remained with William for the next twenty years, later serving as his secretary
and becoming a close friend and confidant. Hobbes published nothing during this time, although
he was amply provided by the Cavendish family with leisure and a library, and used these to
further his studies. He may have contributed three essays (on Tacitus, Rome, and law) to a 1620
work that William published anonymously, Horae Subsecivae (Leisure Hours). Shortly after
William died, Hobbes published the first translation of Thucydides’ History of the Peloponnesian
War into English (1628). During this period, Hobbes also worked occasionally for the Lord
Chancellor and great scientist Francis Bacon, who highly valued him as a secretary, translator,
and conversation partner.
After the death of his employer and friend, Hobbes was discharged with a pension. He
traveled to Europe for eighteen months as a tutor to another young nobleman, Gervaise Clifton.
While traveling in Geneva, Hobbes happened to see a book of Euclid lying open in a
gentleman’s library, and was struck by the deductive method of proof Euclid employs, in which
a conclusion that at first seems impossible becomes self-evident if one accepts the original
definitions and follows each small step of the demonstration. Hobbes’s friend and biographer,
John Aubrey, portrays this as a turning point in Hobbes’s thought. Hobbes often referred to
Euclidian geometry as the model of true science, and characterized his moral and political works
as following this method of deductive reasoning.
Eighteen months after leaving the Cavendish family, Hobbes was called back to serve as
tutor for William’s son, whom he also took to Europe. At this point, Hobbes was working
steadily on the elaboration of an argument that would deduce propositions concerning physical,
psychological, and political subjects from basic principles of matter and motion, a project
inspired by his desire to apply geometric methods to moral and political matters. While in Paris,
Hobbes became close friends with the philosopher and astronomer Pierre Gassendi and engaged
Rene Descartes in argument; in Florence, he talked with Galileo. He presented his developing
thoughts on physics, optics, and psychology to Marin Mersenne, a friar whose salon was the hub
of continental science and philosophy. Mersenne “prais’d and approv’d” Hobbes’s thoughts on
these matters, and from then onward Hobbes “was reputed a philosopher.”
Hobbes returned to England in 1637 to find the country in a state of unrest. Charles I had
antagonized Parliament by attempting to raise money without its consent and by holding High
Anglican views on ecclesiastical matters (which some feared were inspired by his Catholic wife,
Henrietta Maria). He refused to convene Parliament for nine years, but was forced to do so in
1640 to raise money to combat the rebellion of the Scots, who resented his attempts at religious
reform. Parliamentary members took the opportunity, upon meeting, to present a set of
grievances against Charles. Charles quickly dissolved the Parliament, but was forced to recall it
several months later. These political contentions prompted Hobbes to write his first work of
political philosophy, a short treatise entitled The Elements of Law, Natural and Politic, which
was privately circulated in 1640. A pirated version was published in 1650, in two parts: Human
Nature and De Corpore Politico.
In The Elements of Law, Hobbes began to promulgate the view that reason (including
political argument) should be reduced to instrumental thinking, figuring out means to given ends,
rather than seeking to understand the ends themselves. This narrowing of the goals of reason
allowed Hobbes to model his arguments concerning political subjects on a geometric, or
deductive, method. Accordingly, he argued that sovereignty, by definition, requires that subjects
renounce their rights to the sovereign power and yield to the sovereign’s decision about what is
necessary for the polity. Since the members of Parliament in 1640 did not deny the king’s
sovereignty, Hobbes argued, they could not deny him what he requested (taxes) without making
an error in reason, like incompetent geometers. This argument, though only privately circulated,
caused Hobbes to fear that he might be targeted by the Parliamentarians. He therefore decided to
“shift for [him] self,” and in 1640 returned to Paris, where he lived until 1651.
Hobbes planned to write a set of treatises elaborating his materialistic approach to
physics (the study of bodies in motion), psychology (the study of motion in the brain, or the
passions), and political science (the study of the motions of individuals in a commonwealth).
These were organized under the general title Elements of Philosophy, and eventually became the
trilogy Of Body, Of Man, and Of the Citizen (first published in Latin as De Corpore, De
Homine, and De Cive). These works were, however, written and published only slowly over the
next eighteen years, in part because the continuing political upheavals in England provoked
Hobbes to write the last volume, De Cive, first. This treatise was published in Latin in 1642, and
earned Hobbes an international reputation. (It was translated in 1651, in a possibly unauthorized
version, as Philosophical Rudiments Concerning Government and Society.)
 After finishing De Cive, Hobbes began writing the first volume of Elements of Politics,
(De Corpore), but once again political events persuaded him to alter his intentions. During
Hobbes’s self-imposed exile in Paris, civil war broke out in England. In 1646, Charles I was
captured and imprisoned, and his son fled to Paris. From 1646 to 1648, Hobbes served
occasionally as the mathematics tutor to the exiled Charles II. During this time, he put De
Corpore aside to begin writing Leviathan, the first half of which connects his understanding of
how reason and passion operate to his view of the proper, rational basis for political order. The
second half of Leviathan is devoted to the definition of a Christian commonwealth and an exposé
of the “darkness” that results from the promulgation of false religious ideas and philosophical
concepts. However, by the time Leviathan was completed, in 1651, Charles I had been charged
with treason and executed, and Charles II himself had made a failed attempt to restore the
monarchy by force. Charles II made a narrow escape back to Paris in 1651, and Hobbes took the
opportunity to present him with Leviathan. The book, however, angered many of the courtiers
who had gone into exile with Charles, especially the Anglican bishops, and Hobbes was quickly
barred from the court-in-exile.
The Leviathan earned Hobbes tremendous fame, but also further notoriety. He angered
royalists by arguing that the sovereign rules not by divine right, but by consent, and by
portraying the sovereign power as a convention. Hobbes’s secular and skeptical view also
angered French Catholics, who attempted to arrest him in 1651. Hobbes once again feared for his
life, and decided to return to England and submit himself to the Council of State overseeing the
Commonwealth. He added a “Review and Conclusion” to Leviathan that considered the question
of when a subject has the liberty to renounce his obligation to one sovereign and submit himself
to another power, and which concluded that, since sovereignty is identical with the ability to
protect, one has no obligation to a person who has ceased to provide this service.
Hobbes’s political allegiance has been the subject of much commentary. His ambiguous
position seems to have depended in part on his attempt to accommodate himself to the shifting
circumstances of his time, and in part to the rational, rather than partisan, character of his
principles. As Hobbes explained in the dedicatory letter to Leviathan, he found himself in the
middle of a fierce quarrel between those who “contend… for too great liberty” and those who
argue “for too much authority,” and it was “hard to pass between the points of both unwounded.”
It is remarkable that Hobbes managed to antagonize virtually every powerful party of his time,
and yet live and work productively for so long. Ferdinand Toennies, in his classic biography of
Hobbes, suggested that Hobbes accomplished this feat by being intentionally so obnoxious to all
parties that none was willing to afford others the satisfaction of his death—or by offering such a
powerful argument that none was willing to definitively distance his cause from it by too
vigorous persecution.
During the nine years that Hobbes spent in London under the reign of Oliver Cromwell
and his son, Richard, he tried to keep a low profile on political matters, and focused largely on
mathematical questions. He succeeded in finishing De Corpore, which was published in 1655,
and De Homine, which was completed in 1658. However, it proved difficult for Hobbes to keep
out of controversy. His criticism of the English universities in Leviathan provoked a widely read
response by Seth Ward, an Oxford Professor and Bishop of Salisbury. Ward defended the
university curriculum and furthermore criticized Hobbes’s writings on optics, accusing him of
plagiarizing Descartes. Another Oxford Professor, John Wallis, published a scathing critique of
Hobbes’s claim to give proof that the circle can be “squared” in De Corpore, a critique that
included an accusation of disloyalty and atheism. Hobbes responded to these attacks with “Six
Lessons to the Professors of Mathematics” (appended to the 1656 English translation of De
Corpore), and later with “Considerations upon the Reputation, Loyalty, Manners and Religion of
Thomas Hobbes” (1662). Furthermore, earlier correspondence with the Anglican Bishop John
Bramhall was published without authorization in 1654. The debate between Hobbes and
Bramhall concerned determinism, free will, and divine punishment, and was published under the
title “Of Liberty and Necessity.” Bramhall assumed that Hobbes betrayed his confidence and
published an angry reply, to which Hobbes in turn responded with a piece entitled “The
Questions Concerning Liberty, Necessity, and Chance” (1656). Bramhall continued to pursue
Hobbes with his book The Catching of the Leviathan (1658).
In 1659, conflicts between the English Army and Parliament led to the dissolution of
Parliament, the resignation of Richard Cromwell, and a new Parliament, which recalled Charles
II from France and restored him to the throne in 1660. Hobbes was then faced with defending his
decision to return to England and submit to Cromwell. Hobbes’s friend John Aubrey, a famous
biographer of the time, arranged a seemingly chance encounter that reconciled Charles II to
Hobbes, and that resulted in Hobbes receiving a pension and free access to court. At court,
Hobbes became known as “the bear” for the ease with which he was baited into argument by the
ambitious men around Charles II. Charles II remained a protector of Hobbes, but did not allow
him to publish Behemoth, his history of the English Civil War, or to reprint Leviathan.
Throughout the 1660s and 1670s, Hobbes continually fended off attacks by those who
accused him of atheism, of denying objective moral values, and of promoting debauchery.
“Hobbism” became, in the popular lexicon, synonymous with these reprehensible views. Some
of these attacks were veiled jabs at the perceived libertinism of Charles II’s court, although some
were more seriously directed at Hobbes himself. In the early 1660s, it was rumored that Anglican
bishops were planning to try Hobbes for heresy, and, in 1666, a committee in the House of
Commons threatened to investigate blasphemous books, “in particular… the Leviathan.” In
response, Hobbes burnt many of his papers, and wrote a treatise on laws concerning heresy. He
also published several defenses of his own conduct and beliefs, including an appendix to the
Latin version of Leviathan (1668), and an autobiography in Latin verse (1679).
Hobbes was very active and productive throughout his later years, furthering his
scientific and philosophical studies, keeping up correspondence with his friends and admirers
throughout Europe, and responding to his many attackers. He had suffered from the “shaking
palsy” since the mid-1660s and had to dictate most of his works. In October of 1679 he fell
seriously ill and suffered a stroke in December of that year, which shortly thereafter resulted in
his death. He was buried near Hardwick Hall, under a tombstone with an inscription purportedly
written by himself: “He was a virtuous man, and for his reputation for learning, he was well
known at home and abroad.” It is rumored that Hobbes had formerly proposed: “This is the true
philosopher’s stone.”
 Aristotle
We possess only vague impressions and limited biographical reports of Aristotle, called
in the Middle Ages “the master of those who know.” Our scarce testimony comes from letters,
poems, and other material from Stagira, Delphi and Athens. Moreover, ancient biography is not
beyond suspicion, having been compiled long after Aristotle’s lifetime. For example, the best
known text, Diogenes Laertius’ Lives and Opinions of the Eminent Philosophers (220 CE), is a
mélange of fact and fiction. Diogenes has this to report about Aristotle: “He spoke with a lisp,
and he also had weak legs and small eyes, but he dressed elegantly and was conspicuous by his
use of rings and his hair-style.”
Whether or not Aristotle was such a dandy we may never know, but it is certain that his
life and work coincided with the demise of the Greek polis. Aristotle witnessed the defeat of
Athens and Thebes against Philip II at Chaeronea (338 BCE), and, it seems, was a tutor of
Philip’s son, Alexander the Great.
Born in 384 BCE in Stagira, in the northwest of Greece, Aristotle, unlike Plato, was not a
scion of high-born Athenian aristocracy, nor even a citizen of Athens. He was a resident alien (a
“metic”), a foreigner who was deprived of political rights. Nevertheless, he was from a renowned
family. His father Nicomachus was a royal physician at the Macedonian court. Aristotle received
a first-rate education, which was supervised by his guardian after the death of his father. In 367
at the age of seventeen, Aristotle, due to tensions at the court, went to Athens in order to study
with Plato. Plato’s Academy was then the most renowned intellectual center in the Greek world,
and people came from all over to study, learn and teach.
For the next twenty years (367–347), Aristotle studied with Plato and other members of
the Academy—Speusippus, Xenocrates, and Eudoxus of Cnidus. During this first stay in Athens,
Aristotle began to lecture with a blackboard and used various scientific instruments and
astronomical charts, and apparently produced first drafts of his works on physics, metaphysics,
ethics, politics, and rhetoric. Plato, the founder and head of the Academy, was forty-five years
Aristotle’s senior, and while we have no reliable information about their relationship, we have
Aristotle’s own words about his teacher: “Of course such an examination is contrary to us, given
that those who introduced those ideas were our friends. However, … for the preservation of the
truth, we would seem to be obliged not to spare our own sentiments, since we are
philosophers….” Hence the famous Latin dictum attributed to Aristotle (freely paraphrased from
the Greek of the Nicomachean Ethics): amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas, “Plato is a friend,
but truth is a better friend.”
Aristotle does not seem to have involved himself much with political matters in the polis,
although he did found politics as an autonomous science. That said, he acted as mediator
between Macedon and various Greek cities, for which the citizens of Athens were grateful. Most
of his time was consumed with his studies, research and teaching. If the ancient reports are to be
believed, Aristotle spoke with incisive wit and could deliver clear and captivating lectures. A
diligent reader, collector and thinker, he was ever open to the world and learned in its ways, well
beyond simply the teachings of the Academy. He was masterfully versed in the works of the
sophists, the pre-Socratics, the medical writers, as well as Greek lyric, epic, and drama, and the
various constitutions of his world.
After Plato’s death, Aristotle, at the age of thirty-eight, left Athens due to political
danger. Considered too friendly to the Macedonians, who were threatening the freedom of
Greece, he embarked, with his friend Hermias of Atarneus, on his years of travel (347–335/4). In
Assus in Asia Minor, Aristotle was well provided for by the ruler and free to pursue philosophy
and the sciences. There he met his collaborator and friend, Theophrastus of Eresus. He
eventually married Pythias, Hermias’ sister (or niece), with whom he had a daughter of the same
name and a son, Nicomachus.
After Hermias’ death in 345, Aristotle moved to Mytilene on Lesbos. Two years later, at
the request of King Philip, he took up the education of the thirteen-year-old Alexander. It stirs
the imagination: was one of the greatest philosophers the teacher of one of the most powerful
rulers? Yet Aristotle never mentions Alexander in any of his extent works. Aristotle is rumored,
however, to have authored a text, Alexander, or On the Colonies, and to have introduced Greek
wisdom to his young pupil. It is said that Aristotle had a copy of Homer’s Iliad made for
Alexander, and that in his admiration for Achilles, Alexander took it with him on his campaigns.
In addition, Alexander also took scientists with him on his campaigns Following the destruction
of Thebes in 335, and with it the end of Greek resistance to Macedonian rule, Aristotle, almost
fifty, returned for his second sojourn in Athens (335/4–322). During these twelve years, Aristotle
worked at the Lyceum near Mount Lycabettus, a gymnasium open to everyone. Due to its
peculiar architecture it was known also as Peripatos, meaning “walk,” or “hall for strolls and
discussions.” Here Aristotle set his extraordinary library as well as scientific instruments, and
lectured publicly, in the style of the teaching and research of the Academy, revised earlier works
and elaborated new ones, and organized research teams.
Following Alexander’s death in June 323, Aristotle left Athens once again. He was
fearful of falling victim to anti-Macedonian intrigue and under suspicion of impiety, the charge
that led to the death of Socrates (and before him Anaxagoras). He retreated to the house of his
mother in Chalcis on Euboea. He died from illness soon after, in October 322, at the age of sixty-
two. According to his wishes he was buried next to his wife Pythia.
 Karl Marx
Karl Marx ranks among the most influential political philosophers of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries. He spawned a far-reaching intellectual and cultural movement, known as
Marxism; and a worldwide political organization under the name of communism, both of which
followed Marx’s lead by propagating the doctrines of class struggle, historical materialism, and
the inherent contradictions of industrial capital. For this reason his ideas are well known and his
works are widely available, though his earlier writings, which are more philosophical and less
dogmatic than the later economic works, have sometimes been suppressed by Communist
publishers.
Marx was born in 1818 in Trier, in the Rhineland, then part of Prussia. Though he came
from a long line of rabbis, Marx’s father was a lawyer with liberal views who left Judaism and
became a Protestant for social reasons. Marx attended the University of Bonn briefly before
becoming a student of law, theology, and philosophy at the University of Berlin. At Bonn he had
been a member of the Poets’ Club, which counted many political radicals as members. In Berlin,
he joined the Doctor Club, where he associated with the Young Hegelians, whose work he would
later adapt for his teaching on historical materialism. During his college years Marx wrote some
fiction and poetry; a number of his love poems, written to his girlfriend Jenny von Westphalen,
are also available to us. Jenny and Karl met as children, courted as teenagers, married after their
studies, had seven children, and lived together through old age.
Marx wrote his doctoral thesis on the difference between the materialism of Democritus
and Epicurus. His thesis adviser was the heterodox Hegelian Bruno Bauer, and the thesis was
controversial at the University of Berlin for its explicit atheism and overt attacks on theology.
Marx was forced to submit it to the more liberal University of Jena, which gave him his PhD in
1841. In Berlin Marx became the editor of the short-lived Rheinische Zeitung, in which he
regularly criticized not only the conservative Prussian government, but also socialists whom he
thought did not understand either that a real practical struggle was required for revolution, or that
incremental political reforms were insufficient and potentially counterproductive. Marx exhibited
here his lifelong intellectual and political practice, called for by his theoretical conclusions with
regard to the purpose of philosophy, of engaging in political disputes not necessarily to refute his
opponents, but to denounce them; and to offer his own teaching, not as possibility or
interpretation, but as a necessary fact obvious to anyone without ulterior motives.
After the closing of Rheinische Zeitung, Marx moved to Paris, where he continued his
radical activity on behalf of socialism, began to study political economy, and further engaged
with the Young Hegelian critique of religion. Indeed, his thought can be characterized very
roughly as a synthesis of three themes: socialism, political economy, and the critique of religion.
At this time Marx co-edited the one and only issue of German socialist Arnold Ruge’s radical
publication, Deutsch-Französische Jahrbücher, in which he published two of his most important
works, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right and On the Jewish Question.
Here he began to apply the logic of Hegelian dialectic and adapt the critique of religion offered
by the Young Hegelians to economic relations, providing the framework for the later, more
detailed critique of political economy and for the“scientific socialism” of Das Kapital. In 1844
Marx published with Vorwärts! a utopian socialist German-language newspaper in France, and
wrote his Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, in which he sought to justify his developing
economic theories in Hegelian terms.
1844 was also when Marx met Frederich Engels, writer of The Condition of the Working
Class in England in 1844, with whom he will forever be associated. Together they wrote The
Holy Family. In 1845 he wrote the brief “Theses on Feuerbach,” which claimed that if man is to
be made whole, and not to live an alienated existence, he must change the material conditions
that cause that alienation. The task of the philosopher, Marx here expresses most succinctly, is to
enlighten the world by changing it.
Marx was expelled from France in 1845. He went to Brussels, where he began, with
Engels, to write The German Ideology. While in Brussels Marx helped transform a group with
whom he was associated, the League of the Just, into an overt political organization called the
Communist League. The Communist Manifesto is a program of action for this League. He
imagined the transformation from capitalism to socialism would happen quickly, and expended
great energy over the next two years trying to bring it along. Expelled from Brussels, he moved
first to Paris and then Cologne, where he started and ran the Neue Rheinische Zeitung. Marx then
fled to London, where he lived for the rest of his life in relative poverty. He was employed,
though, as a correspondent for the New York Daily Tribune. Marx wrote often on the American
slavery crisis, likening slaves to the industrial proletariat. In London Marx wrote the first volume
of Das Kapital and made notes for the three additional volumes that were later published by
Engels. In 1864 he became involved with the International Workingmen’s Association (now
known as the First International), was elected to the General Council, and ultimately prevailed
over those in the group, such as Mikhail Bakunin, who disagreed with his understanding of
socialism. The First International disbanded in 1876, and when Marx died in 1883 there was no
clearly recognized intellectual head of the worldwide socialist movement. Most socialist thinkers
positioned themselves in relation to Marx’s thought, and as Marxism seemed to require a chief
dogmatist and interpreter of events, competition for this position ensued.
 Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche

Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche was born on October 15, 1844, on the forty-ninth birthday
of his namesake, the Prussian King Friedrich Wilhelm IV, in the small German village of
Röcken bei Lützen, southwest of Leipzig. Nietzsche was descended from Lutheran ministers; his
paternal grandfather, Friedrich August Ludwig Nietzsche, was a distinguished Protestant scholar.
When Nietzsche was five years old, his father, Karl Ludwig Nietzsche (1813–49), died, and his
two-year- old brother, Ludwig Joseph, died six months later. Upon their death, the family moved
to Naumberg an der Saale, where Nietzsche lived with his mother, Franziska, his grandmother,
Erdmuthe, his father’s two sisters, Auguste and Rosalie, and his younger sister, Therese
Elisabeth Alexandria. Near Naumberg, from the ages of 14 to 19 (1858–64), Nietzsche prepared
for university as a student at the esteemed boarding school Schulpforta. Its alumni include
Johann Gottlieb Fichte (1762–1814) and Nietzsche’s lifelong friend Paul Deussen (1845–1919),
who became a famous Orientalist. In his student years, Nietzsche was known for his dedication
to music and literature. He came to know Richard Wagner’s music from the pages of the
Zeitschrift für Musik. His reading in those years included the poetry and romantic writings of
Friedrich Hölderlin and Jean-Paul Richter, and the controversial Life of Jesus Critically
Examined (Das Leben Jesu kritisch bearbeitet, 1835) by David Strauss.
After graduation, Nietzsche matriculated at the University of Bonn (1864) to pursue
studies in theology and philology, eventually settling on a course of philological studies
centering on classical and biblical texts. At Bonn he followed the lectures of Otto Jahn, known
for his biography of Mozart and a student of Karl Lachmann, who was famous for his studies of
Lucretius. In addition, Nietzsche attended the lectures of the classics scholar Friedrich Wilhelm
Ritschl, who was known for his work on the Roman comic Plautus. Nietzsche followed Ritschl
to the University of Leipzig in 1865, where he befriended his fellow philologist Erwin Rohde.
While in Leipzig, Nietzsche began to establish his own academic reputation with essays
on the sixth-century Greek poets Theognis and Simonides, as well as on Aristotle. In 1865
Nietzsche discovered Arthur Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Representation (1818). In
addition to Schopenhauer, Nietzsche studied F. A. Lange’s History of Materialism and Critique
of Its Present Significance (1866).
Nietzsche began his mandatory military service in 1867. Assigned to an equestrian field
artillery regimen near Naumberg, he suffered a serious chest injury while attempting to leap-
mount the saddle. While he was on sick leave, his chest wound festered, so he returned to the
University of Leipzig. Never in outstanding health, further complications arose from Nietzsche’s
August-October 1870 service as a 25-year-old hospital attendant during the Franco-Prussian War
(1870-71). He witnessed the traumatic effects of battle, took close care of wounded soldiers, and
contracted diphtheria and dysentery.
In 1868, he met the composer Richard Wagner (1813–83) at the house of the composer’s
sister. Wagner’s sister was married to Hermann Brockhaus, who had published an edition of the
Zoroastrian text, Vendidad Sade, whose prophet was Zarathustra (Zoroaster). Wagner, like
Nietzsche, was a great Schopenhauer enthusiast. Nietzsche, who had been composing piano,
choral and orchestral music since he was a teen, was drawn to the musical genius and magnetic
personality of the already influential Wagner. The Wagner-Nietzsche relationship had a profound
effect on Nietzsche. In 1869, he noted that the friendship with Wagner was “the greatest
achievement” of his life. Nietzsche reminisced in 1882 that the days with Wagner were the best
in his life.
Ritschl recommended the 24-year-old Nietzsche for a position in classical philology at
the University of Basel, which he assumed in 1869. While there, he published his first book, The
Birth of Tragedy (1872). Wagner loved it and lavished admiring praise on it, but the great
German philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Möllendorff was not so generous. He penned the
authoritative critical review, which had an adverse effect both on the reception of the book and
on Nietzsche. Wilamowitz-Möllendorff went so far as to refer to Nietzsche as a disgrace to their
alma mater, Schulpforta, and memorably recommended that rather than philology, Nietzsche
should instead “gather tigers and panthers about his knees, but not the youth of Germany,” so
prone to prophecy, soothsaying, exaggeration and histrionics free of any historical sense was his
writing. (Nietzsche would later repay the “compliment” thirteen years later, in the final scene of
his great prose-poem Thus Spoke Zarathustra, with its lion warmly nuzzling Zarathustra’s knees:
his audience was not the already lost university professoriat.)
During his Swiss period, between 1872 and 1879, Nietzsche frequented Wagner’s new
Bayreuth home and published a series of four studies critical of modern German culture: the
Untimely Meditations (1873–76). The series was devoted to David Strauss, the historian of
religion; the problem of historicism and historiography; Schopenhauer; and Wagner.
In 1878 Nietzsche broke with Wagner and published Human, All-Too-Human, which
marked a turn in style and analysis and powerfully attacked his former friend, whom he
identified in the work only as “the artist.” By June 1879, Nietzsche’s deteriorating health led to
his resignation from the university post—which he had held for ten years—at the age of 34.
From 1880 until his collapse in 1889, Nietzsche led the nomadic life of a stateless person. His
peregrinations circled between his mother’s home in Naumberg, winters in Nice, and summers in
Sils-Maria, as well as Leipzig, Turin, Genoa, Recoaro, Messina, Rapallo, Florence, Venice, and
Rome. He never stayed in one place for more than several months at a time. In 1882, while in
Rome, Nietzsche met and fell in love with Lou von Salomé, a 21-year-old Russian woman who
was studying philosophy and theology in Zurich. She rejected Nietzsche’s advances in favor of
those of his friend Paul Rée.
It was during this wandering period that Nietzsche composed his greatest works:
Daybreak (1881), The Gay Science (1882/1887), Thus Spoke Zarathustra (1883–85), Beyond
Good and Evil (1886), and On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). And in his final year: The Case
of Wagner (1888), Twilight of the Idols (1888), The Antichrist (1888), Ecce Homo (1888), and
Nietzsche Contra Wagner (1888). On January 3, 1889, while in Turin, Nietzsche had a
breakdown, which left him incapacitated for the rest of his life. According to legend, upon
witnessing the whipping of a horse at the Piazza Carlo Alberto, Nietzsche threw his arms around
the horse’s neck and collapsed into insanity.
Throughout his productive life Nietzsche struggled to have his work published, confident
that his books would have culturally transformative effects. While he did not live long enough to
witness his fame, he did learn that his work was the subject of a series of lectures by Georg
Morris Cohen Brandes, delivered at the University of Copenhagen in 1888.
Upon the death of his mother in 1897, under whose care Nietzsche was living, his sister
Elisabeth—having just returned from Paraguay where she had labored with her husband,
Bernhard Förster, to found an Aryan, anti-Semitic German colony called “Nueva Germania”—
assumed responsibility for her brother. She moved both Nietzsche and his collected manuscripts
to a large house in Weimar—the “Villa Silberblick”—where she received guests to study the
Nietzsche archives, and to observe the now mad philosopher.
Nietzsche died on August 25, 1900, just shy of his fifty-sixth birthday, from pneumonia
and a stroke. His body was buried in the family gravesite at the church in Röcken bei Lützen.
The Nietzsche manuscripts were eventually moved to the Goethe and Schiller Archive in
Weimar.
 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel
Hegel was born in Stuttgart on August 27, 1770, the son of Georg Ludwig Hegel, a
revenue officer with the Duchy of Wurttemburg. Eldest of three children (his younger brother,
Georg Ludwig, died young as an officer with Napoleon during the Russian campaign), he was
brought up in an atmosphere of Protestant pietism. His mother was teaching him Latin before he
began school, but died when he was 11. He was very attached to his sister, Christiane, who later
developed a manic jealousy of Hegel’s wife when he married at age 40 and committed suicide
three months after his death. Hegel was deeply concerned by his sister’s psychosis and
developed ideas of psychiatry based on concepts of dialectics.
Hegel soon became thoroughly acquainted with the Greek and Roman classics while
studying at the Stuttgart Gymnasium (preparatory school) and was familiar with German
literature and science. Encouraged by his father to become a clergyman, Hegel entered the
seminary at the University of Tübingen in 1788. There he developed friendships with the poet
Friedrich Hölderlin and the philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling. From
Hölderlin in particular, Hegel developed a profound interest in Greek literature and philosophy.
Early on and throughout his life, Hegel recorded and committed to memory everything he read –
and he read profusely! Hegel worshipped Goethe and long regarded himself as inferior to his
brilliant contemporaries Schelling and Hölderlin.
The Germany of Hegel’s time was extremely backward from an economic point of view.
Germany was a myriad of tiny, backward states, relatively insulated from the turmoils of Europe.
He was an avid reader of Schiller and Rousseau. Hegel was 18 when the Bastille was stormed
and the Republic declared in France and Hegel was an enthusiastic supporter of the Revolution,
and participated in a support group formed in Tübingen. Hegel finished his first great work, The
Phenomenology of Mind on the very eve of the decisive Battle of Jena, in which Napoleon broke
the Prussian armies and dismembered the kingdom. French soldiers entered Hegel’s house and
set it afire just after he stuffed the last pages of the Phenomenology into his pocket and took
refuge in the house of a high official of the town. In the Phenomenology he attempts to
understand the revolutionary terror of the Jacobins in terms of their interpretation of Freedom.
Hegel celebrated Bastille Day throughout his life.
Having completed a course of study in philosophy and theology and having decided not
to enter the ministry, Hegel became (1793) a private tutor in Berne, Switzerland. In about 1794,
at the suggestion of his friend Hölderlin, Hegel began a study of Immanuel Kant and Johann
Fichte but his first writings at this time were Life of Jesus and The Positivity of Christian
Religion.
In 1796, Hegel wrote The First Programme for a System of German Idealism jointly with
Schelling. This work included the line: “... the state is something purely mechanical – and there
is no [spiritual] idea of a machine. Only what is an object of freedom may be called ‘Idea’.
Therefore we must transcend the state! For every state must treat free men as cogs in a machine.
And this is precisely what should not happen ; hence the state must perish”. In 1797, Hölderlin
found Hegel a position in Frankfurt, but two years later his father died, leaving him enough to
free him from tutoring.
In 1801, Hegel went to the University of Jena. Fichte had left Jena in 1799, and Schiller
had left in 1793, but Schelling remained at Jena until 1803 and Schelling and Hegel collaborated
during that time.
Hegel studied, wrote and lectured, although he did not receive a salary until the end of
1806, just before completing the first draft of The Phenomenology of Mind – the first work to
present his own unique philosophical contribution – part of which was taken through the French
lines by a courier to his friend Niethammer in Bamburg, Bavaria, before Jena was taken by
Napoleon’s army and Hegel was forced to flee – the remaining pages in his pocket.
See Letter from Hegel to Niethammer, 13th October 1806.
Having exhausted the legacy left him by his father, Hegel became editor of the Catholic
daily Bamberger Zeitung. He disliked journalism, however, and moved to Nuremberg, where he
served for eight years as headmaster of a Gymnasium. He continued to work on the
Phenomenology. Almost everything that Hegel was to develop systematically over the rest of his
life is prefigured in the Phenomenology, but this book is far from systematic and extremely
difficult to read. The Phenomenology attempts to present human history, with all its revolutions,
wars and scientific discoveries, as an idealistic self-development of an objective Spirit or Mind.
During the Nuremberg years, Hegel met and married Marie von Tucher (1791-1855).
They had three children – a daughter who died soon after birth, and two sons, Karl (1813-1901)
and Immanuel (1814-91). Hegel had also fathered an illegitimate son, Ludwig, to the wife of his
former landlord in Jena. Ludwig was born soon after Hegel had left Jena but eventually came to
live with the Hegels, too.
While at Nuremberg, Hegel published over a period of several years The Science of
Logic (1812, 1813, 1816). In 1816, Hegel accepted a professorship in philosophy at the
University of Heidelberg. Soon after, he published in summary form a systematic statement of
his entire philosophy entitled Encyclopaedia of the Philosophical Sciences which was first
translated into English in 1959 and includes The Shorter Logic, as Part I. The Encyclopaedia was
continually revised up till 1827, and the final version was published in 1830.
In 1818, Hegel was invited to teach at the University of Berlin, where he was to remain.
He died in Berlin on November 14, 1831, during a cholera epidemic.
The last full-length work published by Hegel was The Philosophy of Right (1821),
although several sets of his lecture notes, supplemented by students’ notes, were published after
his death. Published lectures include The Philosophy of Fine Art (1835-38), Lectures on the
History of Philosophy (1833-36), Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion (1832), and Lectures
on the Philosophy of History (1837).
 Karl Popper: Philosophy of Science
Karl Popper (1902-1994) was one of the most influential philosophers of science of the
20th century. He made significant contributions to debates concerning general scientific
methodology and theory choice, the demarcation of science from non-science, the nature of
probability and quantum mechanics, and the methodology of the social sciences. His work is
notable for its wide influence both within the philosophy of science, within science itself, and
within a broader social context.
Popper’s early work attempts to solve the problem of demarcation and offer a clear
criterion that distinguishes scientific theories from metaphysical or mythological claims.
Popper’s falsificationist methodology holds that scientific theories are characterized by entailing
predictions that future observations might reveal to be false. When theories are falsified by such
observations, scientists can respond by revising the theory, or by rejecting the theory in favor of
a rival or by maintaining the theory as is and changing an auxiliary hypothesis. In either case,
however, this process must aim at the production of new, falsifiable predictions, while Popper
recognizes that scientists can and do hold onto theories in the face of failed predictions when
there are no predictively superior rivals to turn to. He holds that scientific practice is
characterized by its continual effort to test theories against experience and make revisions based
on the outcomes of these tests. By contrast, theories that are permanently immunized from
falsification by the introduction of untestable ad hoc hypotheses can no longer be classified as
scientific. Among other things, Popper argues that his falsificationist proposal allows for a
solution of the problem of induction, since inductive reasoning plays no role in his account of
theory choice.
Along with his general proposals regarding falsification and scientific methodology,
Popper is notable for his work on probability and quantum mechanics and on the methodology of
the social sciences. Popper defends a propensity theory of probability, according to which
probabilities are interpreted as objective, mind-independent properties of experimental setups.
Popper then uses this theory to provide a realist interpretation of quantum mechanics, though its
applicability goes beyond this specific case. With respect to the social sciences, Popper argued
against the historicist attempt to formulate universal laws covering the whole of human history
and instead argued in favor of methodological individualism and situational logic.