Inna’s Reviews > The Oxford Companion to Philosophy > Status Update

abandonment. A rhetorical term used by existentialist philosophers such as Heidegger and Sartre to describe the absence of any sources of ethical authority external to oneself. It suggests that one might have expected to find such an authority, either in religion or from an understanding of the natural world, and that the discovery that there is none leads one to feel 'abandoned'. For existentialists such as Sartre,

Other philosophers deny that actions are events at all: either they think that there are no such things as particular events, or they allow that there are events but say that actions are not among them.Even a proponent of the definition will acknowledge that it does not cover all of the ground where attributions of responsible agency can be made.

The 'absurd' does not in fact play an essential role within existentialist philosophy; but it is an important aspect of the broader cultural context of existentialism, for example in the 'theatre of the absurd', as exemplified by the plays of Samuel Beckett.

absurd, the. A term used by existentialists to describe that which one might have thought to be amenable to reason but which turns out to be beyond the limits of rationality. For example, in Sartre's philosophy the 'original choice' of one's fundamental project is said to be 'absurd', since, although choices are normally made for reasons, this choice lies beyond reason because all reasons for choice are suppos

The existence of abstraction is endorsed by Locke in the Essay Concerning Human Understanding (esp. II. xi. 9 and 10 and III. iii. 6 ff.) but rejected by Berkeley in The Principles of Human Knowledge (esp. paras. 6 ff. and paras. 98, 119, and 125).

The absolutist position corresponds to common traditional views of morality, particularly of a religious kind--what might be called the 'Ten Commandments' idea of morality. Nevertheless, when detached from appeals to religious authority absolutism may appear to be vulnerable to rational criticism.

There are perhaps a dozen established parts of philosophy: epistemology, metaphysics, moral philosophy, political philosophy, philosophical logic, logic, the philosophy of mind, aesthetics, and so on. In the case of each of these, the book contains a long essay on its history and another on its problems as they now are, by contributors not at all new to them.

A fourth part of the book, not an insignificant one, consists in about 150 entries on contemporary philosophers, the largest groups being American and British. It would have been an omission to leave out contemporaries, and faint-hearted. Philosophy thrives. Its past must not be allowed to exclude its present.