Philo

Existentialism is not a systematic philosophy or school, like Stoicism or Epicureanism, so it does not have any "basic axioms." Authors are often grouped together under the label by virtue of exhibiting certain common motifs and concerns in their writing. In the popular mind, those motifs are the sense of anxiety and dread that one's search for the meaning of life can awaken. This popular perception can be misleading. People group Nietzsche, Max Stirner, and Ayn Rand together as philosophical egoists, but I doubt members of this forum would share much interest in what the other two writers had to say about what a proper devotion to self entails. As for the meaning of the quotations you provided, I think most of them are from early Sartre. The basic idea is analagous to Aristotle's definition of intellect as "pure potentiality"--the ability of the mind to take on the form or actuality of its objects, which defines knowledge for him. The related idea for Sartre is that consciousness is always consciousness of something; it has no essence prior to its coming into existence and encountering the objects of the world. The normative point of this observation is supposed to be that the values we choose to live under are not given; they must be constructed out our choices as these arise in our encounter with the world. That is the nature of our freedom, which can be subjectively denied, but not objectively avoided.

That is a complete misunderstanding of Kantian ethics. He is in fact notorious for arguing--against the British moralists of his time--that the presence of a psychological motive like benevolence fails to define an action as moral. Benevolence is obviously not necessarily contrary to morality either, just as appropriately regarded self-interest is not. What none of these motives provide, under a Kantian conception, is the foundation of morality, which can only be derived from an understanding of oneself as a rational and free being. A good, non-technical summary of Kantian ethics is found on Michigan Prof. David Velleman's web-site: http://www-personal.umich.edu/~velleman/Work/KANT.pdf .

Quote: "The two fundamental questions that are generally begged by the standard generative accounts of language are (1) whether this mental "stuff" we are speaking about has to do specifically with language or is more general, for example having to do with problem solving abilities and (2) whether this constitutes an "instinct". Regarding (1): What would be the alternative explanation of the facts that (a) Many cognitive disabilibilities, whether congenital or resulting from brain damage, are often domain-specific--eg., certain types of aphasia leave the functioning of general short and longterm memory as well real-time cognitive processing intact, despite impairing the subject's ability to communicate. As I understand it, the reverse case can also arise in a form of retardation (whose name unfortunately escapes me)--eg., well-formed but cognitively meaningless utterances are produced by those suffering from it. ( Children exposed to non-syntactic pidgins will automatically transform the language into a regularly structured creole. Regarding (2): The debate may boil down to the semantics of "instinct," but there is obviously a difference between the way children spontaneously acquire spoken language versus the degree of difficulty required for mastering written language.

No epistemologist I know of would categorize "belief" in any way like that, and if you argued against the traditional definition of knowledge as "justified true belief" in that fashion you would be arguing at cross-purposes. To have a belief is simply to be disposed to assert or assent to a proposition that has truth-conditions. Again, no epistemologist would recognize this definition of justification. The justification relation has to do with the reliability of the cognitive processes involved in acquiring a belief and the strength of the evidence one has in support of it. Though different philosophers will gloss this in different ways (most contemporary epistemology is devoted to fleshing this out), I do not know of any serious philosopher who has argued that emotion or wish-fulfillment satisfies the justification condition. The examples of irrationally acquired beliefs that you mention are precisely what the justification condition rules out. Also, who are the neo-platonic philosophers you have in mind?

Harvard has an Objectivist Club, which may have people interested in joining your group. http://hcs.harvard.edu/~hoc/ Philo

Read his "Theory of Moral Sentiments." http://socserv2.socsci.mcmaster.ca/~econ/u...mith/moral.html He considered morality to be the outgrowth of a natural faculty of emotional sympathy--i.e., the kind of thing autistic children lack.