PHILOSOPHY 201 (STOLZE)

Notes on Thomas Wartenberg, Existentialism

Chapter Five: Finitude

• Rationalism vs. Empiricism

• The Problem of Evil

• Leibniz’s Solution

• Dostoevsky’s Protest

• Fleeing from Death

Rationalism vs. Empiricism

• Rationalism = “humans ought to live so as to overcome their limitations as finite beings and aspire to instantiate a divine, and hence complete, being, most notably by denying our desires in favor of the demands of reason” (p. 90).

• Empiricism = “explicate the nature of human knowing, doing, and valuing, not what capacities might be like in a being fundamentally different from us” (p.90).

• Existentialism is a radical empiricism that wants “to root out all traces of the rationalist model of philosophy” (p. 90).

The Problem of Evil

(1) God is an all-powerful, all-knowing, and supremely good being.

(2) If God is all-powerful, then God could have created a world without genuine physical and moral evil.

(3) If God is all-knowing, then God knows that there is genuine physical and moral evil in the world.

(4) If God is supremely good, then God would want there to be a world without genuine physical and moral evil.

(5) But there is genuine physical and moral evil in the world.

(6) So, God (at least as defined above) does not exist.

Leibniz’s Solution

• God cannot create the world without allowing a certain amount of evil; however, God allows only as much evil as is logically compossible.

• This is the “best of all possible worlds.”

• Leibniz’s analogy with a landscape painting.

Dostoevsky’s Protest

• In his novel the Brothers Karamazov Doetoevsky rejects the idea that justified; Ivan “simply refuses to accept the world if its existence requires that innocent people suffer” (p. 96)

• The problem of absolute evils that, unlike relative evils, “cannot be redeemed or justified in relation to something else” (p. 97)

Fleeing from Death

• A syllogism regarding death from Tolstoy’s short story “The Death of Ivan Ilych” (p. 102)

Heidegger on Death

• Although our deaths are certain, they are indeterminate.

• The They and the denial of death: “Dasein flees in the face of death.”

• Existentialists insist that we must accept the finality of death and reject the possibility of an afterlife.