Nonfiction and Philosophy - CLEP Humanities

Existentialism was a disparate philosophical movement that emerged in the nineteenth century through the writings of Soren Kierkegaard, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Fyodor Dostoyevsky. Largely focusing on the individual and the subjectivity of human thought, existentialism was a critical reaction to philosophers such as Immanuel Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Existentialism would further develop in France during the first half of the twentieth century thanks to figures like Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir, and Albert Camus.

Ludwig Wittgenstein's considerable fame as a philosopher comes on the strength of just two books. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus was a slim book published in 1921, while Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations were compiled after his death from his notebooks and published in 1953. The Philosophical Investigations were largely a refutation and rebuttal of Wittgenstein's earlier work.

Edward Saïd is a writer most well-known for his book Orientalism, which was published in 1978.

In Cold Blood was considered the first "non-fiction novel" shortly after the book's publication. Its author, Truman Capote, was already an acclaimed author, and sought out the story of two murderers, Richard Hickock and Perry Smith. Capote interviewed and talked with the murderers for over a year to craft his book, which became a bestseller as soon as it was published.

The Myth of Sisyphus, written by Albert Camus during the Nazi Occupation of France in World War II, uses the ancient story of Sisyphus to explain life. Just as Sisyphus was doomed to continually push a rock up a hill, Camus argued people had a life with little meaning. Nonetheless, he argued that humans should strive to rebel against the absurdity of such a life.

Bertrand Russell was one of the foremost and earliest articulators of an atheist position. By affirming what he did believe, Russell made his mark in religious discussions with his Why I am Not a Christian. The work would prove influential for many more anti-Christian and atheist works in subsequent decades.

After the heterodox Christian Søren Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, the philosophical movement known as existentialism was largely picked up by atheists. However, in the post-World War II period, the Christian theologian Paul Tillich embraced many of existentialism's chief tenets, including alienation, an inability to know things concretely, and the desire for an authentic life. This made Tillich simultaneously controversial and widely celebrated.

Rainer Maria Rilke was a poet universally described as "mystical," and always attracted a large following from the time he first published in the 1890s. Franz Xaver Kappus, a nineteen-year-old cadet at the Theresian Military Academy, received ten letters on poetry from Rilke from 1902 to 1908. In 1928, three years after Rilke died of leukemia, Kappus collected and published the letters as Letters to a Young Poet.

Martin Heidegger believed that philosophers since Plato had misunderstood the concept of "being." Heidegger objected to philosophy consistently studying "beings," but rarely ever "being itself." Heidegger's 1927 book Being and Time attempted to correct this problem, but was rushed to publication and only covered a fraction of what he wanted to cover in his work.

Educated as psychiatrist, Frantz Fanon was born in Martinique and lived for a long time in Algeria, where he fought in the Algerian revolution against France. As a black man fighting against European powers, Fanon developed many theories about the psychological effect of colonialism. His final work, The Wretched of the Earth, made as he was dying of leukemia in 1961, argued that a colonial people had the right to fight their rulers and demand their freedom, and became highly influential for a variety of left wing revolutionaries in the late twentieth century.

It was Edmund Husserl who inaugurated the movement known as Phenomenology. He was closely concerned with issues pertaining to the foundations of mathematics and logic as well as numerous questions in psychology being discussed in his time. Phenomenology became a wide and varied field, incorporating many thinkers throughout the 20th century. It remains a major school of thought, though its influence has become more diffuse. Husserl believed that he was providing a form of philosophy that overcame the modern problem of Idealism, allowing philosophers once again to discuss the "things in themselves." Phenomenology became a study of the way that things "appear"—how they come into awareness and just how they are constituted by the human knower. He is known for works such as Logical Investigations, Ideas (in numerous versions), Cartesian Meditations, and Formal and Transcendental Logic.

Perhaps you do not know all of these thinkers, though the names are likely to be somewhat known to you, at least from lists in texts. Sadly, America has not existed long enough to create a large group of philosophers as was the case in ancient Greece, the High Middle Ages (or even the so-called period of "Silver Scholasticism" in Spain and the Low Countries), or modern Europe. Still, there have been some, but among their number has never been Bertrand Russell. Lord Russell is an Englishman—a great logician and mathematician but not an American philosopher.

The 20th century political philosopher, Leo Strauss, believed that many political and philosophical writings contain esoteric meanings. He came to this conclusion based on his interpretations of the writings of the Muslim philosopher al-Farabi and the dialogues of Plato. Plato's dialogues are particularly well known for the use of many layers of irony, wit, and story to express deep philosophical truths. Strauss (and his followers, who are called "Straussians") came to use this method for interpreting many texts.

He was very influential, given his time as a professor at the University of Chicago, and is often associated with the American political movement known as neoconservatism. This association is not quite true, however. Really, if his followers share anything in common, it is a devotion to a close reading of texts, often those of Greek thinkers but also including others in the canon of philosophy and political philosophy. Their readings do tend to be so close as to look for many such hidden shades of esoteric meanings.

Suetonius is most famous for his history of the Roman Empire, De Vita Caesarum, widely known in English as The Twelve Caesars. Marcus Aurelius was an Emperor himself, also known for his philosophical work, The Meditations. Juvenal and Plautus were Roman comedy authors, while Aeschylus was a Greek playwright.

Plato's works were largely written as dialogues, conversations between two different thinkers on a weighty topic. In most of the dialogues, the key figure was Plato's teacher, Socrates. Socrates is considered one of the leading progenitors of Western philosophy, largely thanks to the writings of Plato.

While all the Roman Emperors read philosophy and a few others wrote literary works, only Marcus Aurelius, emperor from 161-180 CE, actually wrote a philosophical tract, known as The Meditations. Marcus Aurelius' Meditations were a development on Stoic philosophy, and the work is really a collection of thoughts and quotations compiled while Marcus Aurelius was Emperor and leading the Roman Army on campaigns.

De Oratore was considered a model of how to conduct rhetoric and oratory, not only in the ancient world, but throughout European history into the Renaissance. Its author, Cicero, became widely beloved in the Middle Ages and beyond for his philosophical focus on the engaged moral and noble man.

The three great Greek philosophers are uniquely tied together, through a series of teacher-student relationships. Socrates, the great founder of Greek philosophy, directly taught Plato, who recorded most of Socrates' thought. Plato then taught Aristotle himself, which makes the entire chain of Greek philosophy tied to all three.

Located in his work The Republic, the allegory of the cave is one of the most famous ideas associated with the Greek philosopher Plato. Taking place in a dialogue with Socrates, the allegory describes people chained inside a cave, forced to watch only the images projected by shadows on the cave wall and assuming this is reality. Plato has Socrates assert that a philosopher's role is to bring people out of the cave and into reality by destroying what they assumed by only watching the shadows in the cave.

During the period of the Pre-Socratics (literally, the philosophers before Socrates), many Greek thinkers focused on trying to figure out the nature of the world. They wanted to figure out how one thing (like a human person or even a rock) could be made up of many parts (like the organs, tissues, or even mere molecules involved in the former). When you read the Pre-Socratics, they can seem pretty crazy, but they were on to something, so to speak. They wanted to figure out just what it means for one thing to be many and for a thing to change (but still remain this or that particular thing).

Heraclitus was well known for cryptic sayings. Indeed, he was so well known that a minor American philosopher who used to live in Washington, DC was called the "Heraclitus of the Potomac," meaning that he was as difficult to understand as was Heraclitus.

In any case, Heraclitus is well known for some form of the saying, "You cannot step into the same river twice." One of Heraclitus's insights (among many others) was that change plays an important role in everything that we experience. Thus, when you walk into a river, it has certain molecules. When you step in again, those molecules have gone by and new ones have replaced it. Of course, if we carried this saying to the extreme, we would also say that you and I are quite different people at every moment of our lives—for our molecules change quite a bit.

The great systematizer, Aristotle, would see how this is true—but only in a certain respect. He would do this by analyzing how there are different kinds of causes involved in everything—one of which is the matter (which does indeed change).