Idealism is the part of philosophy that focuses on the mind and its creations, which implies the problematic notion that everything we ever experience can only be shaped by our senses and the way our mind functions.
It has its roots in German philosophy, of which Immanuel Kant is one of the most important figures. He is said to have affected a Copernican revolution in philosophy, akin to Copernicus’ reversal of the age-old belief that the sun revolved around the earth, through his groundbreaking work on the structure of experience. He argued that human experience could not not be affected by the features of our minds; the consequence is that we can only experience a phenomenal world, as conveyed by our senses, and never the reality itself, which nobody has ever seen.
The other groundbreaking German thinker, Schopenhauer, shows what happen when great philosophy becomes somber, pessimistic, even brutal, while still resonating with a sarcastic laugh. He was among the first to contend that the universe is essentially not a rational place; in his most famous work, “The World as Will and Representation”, he argues that the individuals of a species do not have as much free will as is ordinarily thought.
This audiobook is a careful compilation of essential quotes summarizing the fundamental ideas of these great philosophers, to get you acquainted with the subtleties of their work in a practical and efficient way.
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