The bases of Philosophy- the tutorial..pdf
.pdfDumas and the Norwegian Henrik Ibsen, might serve to criticize society and so lead to reform.
Nineteenth-century English essayist Walter Pater was deeply interested in art, aesthetics, and literature. A distinguished man of letters, he tried to educate the public of his time about the culture of the Renaissance through essays. In his novel Marius the Epicurean, published in 1885, he described the experiences of a young Roman living in the 2nd century, during the reign of the emperor and Stoic philosopher Marcus Aelius Aurelius Antoninus. Pater, the originator of the phrase “art for art’s sake,” was a member of an aesthetic movement of the late 1800s that argued that art needed no other goal than to create or evoke beauty.
In the 19th century, however, avant-garde concepts of aesthetics began to challenge traditional views. The change was particularly evident in painting. French impressionists, such as Claude Monet, denounced academic painters for depicting what they thought they should see rather than what they actually saw—that is, surfaces of many colours and wavering forms caused by the distorting play of light and shadow as the sun moves.
In the late 19th century, postimpressionists such as Paul Cézanne, Paul Gauguin, and Vincent van Gogh were more concerned with the structure of a painting and with expressing their own psyche than with representing objects in the world of nature. In the early 20th century this structural interest was developed further by cubist painters such as Pablo Picasso, and the expressionist concern was reflected in the work of Henri Matisse and other fauves and by the German expressionists such as Ernst Ludwig Kirchner. The literary aspects of expressionism can be seen in the plays of August Strindberg, a Swede, and Frank Wedekind, a German.
Closely connected with these relatively non-representational approaches to art was the principle of “art for art's sake,” which was derived from Kant's view that art has its own reason for being. The phrase was first used by the French philosopher Victor Cousin in 1818. This doctrine, sometimes called aestheticism, was espoused in England by the critic Walter Horatio Pater, by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, and by the expatriate American painter James Abbott McNeill Whistler. In France it was the credo of such symbolist poets as Charles Baudelaire. The “art for art's sake” principle underlies most of avant-garde Western art of the 20th century.
Four philosophers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries have been the primary influences on present-day aesthetics. In France Henri Bergson defined science as the use of intelligence to create a system of symbols that supposedly describes reality but actually falsifies it. Art, however, is based on intuition, which is a direct apprehension of reality unmediated by thought. Thus art cuts through conventional symbols and beliefs about people, life, and society and confronts one with reality itself.
In Italy the philosopher and historian Benedetto Croce also exalted intuition, but he considered it the immediate awareness of an object that somehow gives that object form. It is the apprehension of things before one reflects about them. Works of art are the expression, in material form, of such intuitions; but beauty and ugliness are not qualities of the works of art but qualities of the spirit expressed intuitively in these works of art.
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The American philosopher and poet George Santayana argued that when one takes pleasure in a thing the pleasure may be regarded as a quality of the thing itself, rather than as a subjective response to it. Just as one may characterize some human act as good in itself, instead of calling it good merely because one approves it, so one may say that some object is beautiful, not merely that one's aesthetic delight in its colour and form leads one to call it beautiful.
John Dewey, the American educator and philosopher, viewed human experience as disconnected, fragmentary, full of beginnings without conclusions, or as experiences deliberately manipulated as means to ends. Those exceptional experiences that flow from their beginnings to consummations are aesthetic. Aesthetic experience is enjoyment for its own sake, is complete and self-contained, and is terminal, not merely instrumental to other purposes.
Control questions:
1.How do you understand the concept “aesthetics”?
2.Why art is the main part of aesthetics?
3.What is the evolution of art developing?
4.How can you explain the concept “beauty”?
LECTURE 10: RELIGION AS ONE OF THE PHILOSOPHY STRUCTURE
ELEMENT
1.The concept of religion.
2.Religion as a branch of philosophy.
3.Christianity, Islam and Buddhism.
Religion has existed in all human societies from early times. Although belief systems and traditions of worship differ from culture to culture, they also have many common elements. In all cultures, human beings make a practice of interacting with what are taken to be spiritual powers. These powers may be in the form of gods, spirits, ancestors, or any kind of sacred reality with which humans believe themselves to be connected.
Religion sacred engagement with that which is believed to be a spiritual reality. Religion is a worldwide phenomenon that has played a part in all human culture and so is a much broader, more complex category than the set of beliefs or practices found in any single religious tradition. An adequate understanding of religion must take into account its distinctive qualities and patterns as a form of human experience, as well as the similarities and differences in religions across human cultures.
In all cultures, human beings make a practice of interacting with what are taken to be spiritual powers. These powers may be in the form of gods, spirits, ancestors, or any kind of sacred reality with which humans believe themselves to be connected. Sometimes a spiritual power is understood broadly as an all-embracing reality, and sometimes it is approached through its manifestation in special symbols. It may be
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regarded as external to the self, internal, or both. People interact with such a presence in a sacred manner—that is, with reverence and care. Religion is the term most commonly used to designate this complex and diverse realm of human experience.
The word religion is derived from the Latin noun religio, which denotes both earnest observance of ritual obligations and an inward spirit of reverence. In modern usage, religion covers a wide spectrum of meanings that reflect the enormous variety of ways the term can be interpreted. At one extreme, many committed believers recognize only their own tradition as a religion, understanding expressions such as worship and prayer to refer exclusively to the practices of their tradition. Although many believers stop short of claiming an exclusive status for their tradition, they may nevertheless use vague or idealizing terms in defining religion—for example, “true love of God,” or “the path of enlightenment.” At the other extreme, religion may be equated with ignorance, fanaticism, or wishful thinking.
By defining religion as a sacred engagement with what is taken to be a spiritual reality, it is possible to consider the importance of religion in human life without making claims about what it really is or ought to be. Religion is not an object with a single, fixed meaning, or even a zone with clear boundaries. It is an aspect of human experience that may intersect, incorporate, or transcend other aspects of life and society. Such a definition avoids the drawbacks of limiting the investigation of religion to Western or biblical categories such as monotheism (belief in one god only) or to church structure, which are not universal. For example, in tribal societies, religion—unlike the Christian church—usually is not a separate institution but pervades the whole of public and private life. In Buddhism, gods are not as central as the idea of a Buddha (fully enlightened human being). In many traditional cultures the idea of a sacred cosmic order is the most prominent religious belief. Because of this variety, some scholars prefer to use a general term such as the sacred to designate the common foundation of religious life.
Religion in this understanding includes a complex of activities that cannot be reduced to any single aspect of human experience. It is a part of individual life but also of group dynamics. Religion includes patterns of behaviour but also patterns of language and thought. It is sometimes a highly organized institution that sets itself apart from a culture, and it is sometimes an integral part of a culture. Religious experience may be expressed in visual symbols, dance and performance, elaborate philosophical systems, legendary and imaginative stories, formal ceremonies, meditative techniques, and detailed rules of ethical conduct and law. Each of these elements assumes innumerable cultural forms. In some ways there are as many forms of religious expression as there are human cultural environments.
The first recorded Western attempts to understand and document religious phenomena were made by the Greeks and Romans. As early as the 6th century BC, Greek philosopher Xenophanes noted that different cultures visualized the gods in different ways. In the following century, Greek historian Herodotus recorded the wide range of religious practices he encountered in his travels, comparing the religious observances of various cultures, such as sacrifice and worship, with their Greek equivalents. Roman historians Julius Caesar and Cornelius Tacitus similarly recorded the rites and customs of peoples that they met on their military campaigns.
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Although the systematic study of religions did not emerge until the latter half of the 19th century, the groundwork was laid in the three preceding centuries. In the 16th century, Western knowledge of other cultures increased dramatically through extensive trade and exploration. Explorers and missionaries reported in detail on the range of religious beliefs and practices around the world. As a result, a great deal of traditional bias against non-Christian religions was challenged as early as the 16th and 17th centuries.
In the Age of Enlightenment (early and mid-18th century), thinkers took a special interest in what they termed natural religion—the inborn capacity of all humans to arrive at a belief in the existence of a supreme being and to act on that belief. To thinkers of the Enlightenment, natural religion compared favourably with the supernatural religion of the Bible. For example, French philosopher Voltaire condemned the social effects of revealed religion (religion that is communicated through supernatural authorities such as prophets or sacred scriptures), and German philosopher Johann Gottfried von Herder argued that every culture possesses a unique spirit that is part of its religion and its language. In a critique of biblical history, Scottish philosopher David Hume demonstrated the historical difficulties involved in tracing all human cultures to the offspring of the biblical patriarch Noah or in asserting that monotheism is the original form of religion.
By the late 19th and early 20th centuries, scholars had begun to pose basic questions about the origin and development of religious ideas. Scholars questioned how religion began and the stages of its evolution. Some maintained that it originated with a belief in spirits (animism), then evolved into the notion that there were many gods (polytheism), and ultimately emerged as the ideal of a single god (monotheism). Others held that religion began in a sense of awe at the impressive activities of nature, in a feeling of reverence for the spirits of the dead, or in an attempt to overcome mortality. Many other important questions about the nature of religion were addressed during this period: Can religion be divided into so-called primitive and higher types? Is religion a product of psychological needs and projections? Is it a function of political and social control? Such questions have continued to generate a large number of theories.
Religious life reflects an individual’s attempt to live in accordance with the precepts of a religious tradition. For example, Buddhists imitate the Buddha; Christians strive to be Christ-like; and followers of the mystical Dao (or Tao, the Chinese term for the ultimate way of the universe) practice non-interference with the natural course of things. Religious experience also reflects the variety of cultural expressions in general: It can be formal or spontaneous, solemn or festive, hierarchical or egalitarian; it can emphasize submission or liberation; it can be devotional or contemplative; it can involve fear or joy; it can be comforting or disruptive; it can encourage reliance on powers outside oneself or on personal responsibility.
The idea that sacredness is an individual experience and the idea that it is influenced by environmental factors are not necessarily in conflict. Religious life is given distinctive form both by the power of a community’s social bonds and its traditional objects of veneration, and by an individual’s personal interaction with
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those objects. In addition, mythic language and ritual serve as a focus for religious experience. The attempt to isolate the distinctive qualities of religion can be seen in the work of a number of influential thinkers. Considered together, these approaches offer a representative picture of the ways in which modern investigators have understood the place of the sacred in human life.
In many cases, the things that people consider sacred are determined by the community to which they belong. The holiest things in the world to one group—its gods, saviours, scriptures, or sacraments—are not necessarily seen as sacred absolutes by another group. The notion that sacredness is a value that a given society places on objects, that such objects shape and generate the religious feelings of its members.
Sacred things are those objects and symbols, including principles and beliefs, that must be preserved from violation because they represent all that is of most value to the community. All cultures hold something sacred. In secular Western societies, the sacred might be embodied in certain principles, such as individual rights, freedom, justice, or equality. In Durkheim’s view, therefore, religion is not a matter of claims about the universe that are either true or false, but is the normal way that a society constructs and maintains its cherished tradition and moral values.
For Eliade, myth and ritual represent the central language by means of which religious worlds are structured. In his approach, myth is not merely fiction or folktale but the powerful words and stories that recount the actions of gods and founders and the guidelines they set down for human life. In this sense, myth describes not what is simply fantastic but what is most real, naming the spiritual forces that established the world and that continue to permeate it. Religion has its own language to describe the spiritual order of the universe, just as science has its descriptions of the physical world. Moreover, the purpose of describing the divine time of origins is not only to provide an explanation for how the world began, but also to provide a reference point—in a sense, a script—for living in the present world. Religious people aspire to live in the time of divine origins: for observing Jews, Friday night is not only Friday night, but also the beginning of the Sabbath as instituted by the Creator at the beginning of time; and for observing Christians, Christmas becomes the time of the birth of Christ. Ritual times and places create opportunities for religious people to come into contact with the sacred and its regenerative power.
Most religious systems are organized around certain past events and models. Each religion has its own account of the history of the world—the great time when gods, creators, sages, ancestors, saviours, founders, or heroes established or revealed the essential elements of the religion. These collective memories are ordinarily preserved in carefully maintained oral traditions or in the classic accounts known as scriptures or sacred writings. In Christian histories, the key event of the past is the incarnation of God in Jesus Christ, whose teachings, death, and resurrection set the model for the meaning of Christian life. In Judaism the great time was the Exodus (the flight from Egypt under Moses) and the subsequent receiving of the Law at Mount Sinai. The enlightenment experience of the Buddha and the revelation of the Qur'an (Koran) (Islamic scripture) to the prophet Muhammad are defining events in Buddhism and Islam, respectively. The Islamic calendar begins with the birth of
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Islam in AD 622, the Christian calendar begins with the birth of Christ, and the Jewish calendar begins with the biblical time of the Creation itself.
The Qur’an, the holy book of Islam, sets forth the basic requirements of Muslim life, including spiritual, social, and legal codes of conduct. Muslims believe that this sacred scripture, which is also called the Koran, is the infallible word of Allah, or God, as it was revealed to the prophet Muhammad in the 7th century. The Qur’an, divided into 114 chapters called suras, is recited on many occasions. This sura, which refers to jinn (spirits who are created from fire), exhorts believers to follow the path of God or risk punishment.
During the early 7th century, a trader named Muhammad was meditating in a cave near Mecca in what is now Saudi Arabia, when he experienced a vision of the archangel Gabriel who declared Muhammad to be a prophet of God. Other revelations followed, and Muhammad began to preach to others, reciting in verse the instructions he had received from God. These revelations became the Koran, the sacred scripture of Islam. In this passage from Muhammad’s teachings, he teaches his followers, called Muslims, to lead a righteous life through their faith and works.
Religions provide for continual renewal by setting aside special times for their adherents to recollect and demonstrate what they hold sacred. These occasions may take place annually, monthly, weekly, daily, or even hourly. Muslims are expected to pause for prayer at five different times every day, and during the holy month of Ramadan—which honours the month when the Qur'an was first revealed—they are expected to observe a fast every day from sunrise to sunset. For Jews, the High Holy Days—a ten-day period in autumn celebrating the new year and concluding with the holiest day of the year, Yom Kippur (the Day of Atonement)—is a major time of spiritual renewal, as is Passover in the spring. Jews dedicate the seventh, or Sabbath, day to recalling the divine basis of life. Christians follow a similar seven-day cycle but give special prestige to Sunday, honouring the day of the resurrection of Jesus Christ, which, according to the Christian scriptures, occurred on the first day of the week. Every religion, large or small, has regular major festivals and observances that celebrate and display its fundamental commitments and that intensify and renew the spiritual memory of its followers.
Religions not only create sacred times that define the calendar and occur throughout the year, intersecting with ordinary time, they also establish special places that localize the sacred in the midst of ordinary space. Sometimes these are places of natural beauty or imposing power, such as mountains, caves, or rivers. They may also be sites that commemorate great religious events of the past—for example, the birthplace of the Hindu god Krishna; the site of the Buddha’s enlightenment; or the spot where Muhammad is believed to have journeyed to heaven (memorialized by the Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem). Sometimes they are places where miraculous spiritual appearances are believed to have occurred, as in the case of the apparitions of the Virgin Mary at Lourdes, France. They may also be shrines and temples built to house the gods or their representative symbols, such as the Parthenon in Greece, which was dedicated to Athena, patron goddess of Athens. Holy places also become objects of pilgrimage, such as the Kaaba, the holiest shrine of Islam, in Mecca, Saudi Arabia. For Muslims, the Kaaba is the symbol of true monotheistic religion and is
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believed to have been built by biblical patriarch Abraham. All Muslims are expected to visit it at some time in their lives. Sometimes the act of building a sacred place occurs each time the rite is performed and is thus part of the ritual itself, as in the case of the annual Native American Sun Dance ceremonies, for which a new lodge is erected each year.
The use of space reveals a great deal about a religious worldview. Some structures, such as Pueblo kivas (ceremonial chambers), are built into the ground, acknowledging the earth as the place from which human beings emerged and as the source of sustenance for the Pueblo’s agricultural society. Others, such as the European gothic cathedrals, through their delicate architecture and skyward reach, suggest the transcendence of the divine realm. Shinto shrines in Japan express reverence for nature in the harmonious way they blend with the natural environment. On the other hand, some so-called mega-churches (churches with huge congregations) of modern North America have taken the form of corporate office complexes geared for efficiency of organized service. Some holy places are understood to be the actual dwelling place of the god. Others—as in certain branches of Protestant tradition—are understood to be primarily places of gathering for the faithful. In such cases, a plain architectural style follows naturally from the desire to de-emphasize the importance of the physical building itself.
Religious cultures generally ascribe spiritual significance to all parts of their worlds. This is especially obvious in rites of passage. Through ritual, each major change in life is incorporated into the domain of the sacred. For example, birth rites might involve bestowing the blessings of the god on the child or giving the child a special religious name. Rites of entry into adulthood also connect the individual to the sacred tradition of the culture. For example, in Buddhist Thailand, young men become sons of Buddha through a ceremony in which they re-enact key parts of the historical Buddha’s search for enlightenment. In Jewish bar mitzvahs and bat mitzvahs, adolescents, having reached the age of 13, read from the Torah, the primary scripture of Judaism. Christian youths participate in First Communion, in which they take part in the Eucharist (a ceremony involving blessed bread and wine, which represent the body and blood of Christ) for the first time. Weddings and funerals are two other ceremonies of passage laden with sacred meaning.
All of life—including food, work, suffering, human relations, sexuality and marriage, education, the arts, and government—can be given religious significance. Many religions have detailed rules of purity that bear on every aspect of behaviour. In this way, the religious reality—whether conceived as a divine commandment, the will of God, Buddha nature, or the Tao—is acknowledged to be the true and proper basis of all life.
Religious cultures provide their members with established, patterned ways of interacting with spiritual beings. Such communication is often the centre of religious practice. Perhaps the most widely practiced forms are petitionary prayer (prayer that contains a request), offerings and sacrifices, purification and penance, and worship. Sometimes these are regular events, and sometimes they are performed in times of special need, such as illness, drought, infertility, or war—times when human beings find themselves especially dependent on or subject to the forces of the universe that
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are beyond their control. At other times, religions have forms of communion, such as the Christian Eucharist or meditation on the presence of a supreme being. Reciting the name of the Buddha is the primary religious practice in Pure Land Buddhism, and this practice has parallels among other religious groups, such as the Sikhs.
The gods, in turn, are believed to make their will, power, or presence known to humans in a variety of ways, including prophecy, states of trance, dreams and visions, divination, healings, special signs and miracles, intuition, mystical experiences, and embodiment in the lives of special individuals. In many societies, possession (control of a person’s body by a spiritual entity) is a common form of interchange with the spirit world. Through intensive training, a shaman acquires the ability to enter trance states and negotiate with gods and spirits. In so-called possession rites, spirits are believed to enter the bodies of devotees. Divination, or techniques for reading the will and timing of the gods through the shape or significations of physical objects, is also widespread. Relationship with the divinity can also be expressed in terms of moral behaviour. In this case, service to the gods means devotedly adhering to their revealed precepts for conduct and their standards of spiritual life in general. In some religions, individuals cultivate a lifelong personal relationship with their deity.
Ritual is a form of communication in its own right. Rituals involve performance and symbolic bodily actions, displayed in a tangible, visible way. They have the power to focus experience and thus function to intensify the sense of the sacred. Rituals can be as simple as bowing one’s head before a meal, chanting a certain phrase, or removing footwear. At the other extreme, they can involve intricate ceremonies performed by teams of priests and lasting several days. Rituals reveal the sacred through specific, symbolic actions and objects, including processions, special clothing, special sounds—for example chanting—or silences, masks, symbolic objects, and special foods. Some religions use rituals to great effect, while others assign them a lesser role. Where ritual is central, there is usually a priesthood. This is the case in the Catholic and Orthodox forms of Christianity as well as in Hinduism, Buddhism, and Shinto. Jews, Muslims, and many Protestant churches do not have a priesthood as such because they emphasize a direct faith and consideration of scripture (training in which is required for rabbis, imams, and ministers).
Religions differ in their use of images. Jews, Muslims, and puritanical forms of Protestantism prohibit images of God in order to preserve the transcendence and holiness of the divine. But images of holy persons or of the deity are important objects of veneration in Catholicism, in Eastern Orthodox Christianity (in which they are called icons), and in most other religions .
Most major religions provide paths that deliver individuals from the bondage of sin, immorality, ignorance, and other types of impurity or disharmony and lead them toward a state of purity of soul, spiritual knowledge, wisdom, godliness, enlightenment, or even eternal life. Religions typically hold that human beings have a higher nature that exists in tension with a lower nature, and the religions offer ways to redeem the former from the latter. Even within a single religious tradition there may be different versions of this process. Some emphasize the separation of the spiritual part of the self from worldly attachments, while others emphasize living harmoniously in relation to nature, self, and divinity.
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Two corresponding religious ideals can be discerned from the different ways in which religions consider salvation. On one hand, the saved or truly religious person may be one who has achieved liberation from the material world and has reached a heavenly state of afterlife (such as heaven) or a supreme state of consciousness (such as nirvana). On the other hand, this person may be one who has come to embody the virtues of holiness, however they are defined by the particular religion, while still living on earth. Monasticism arose in some religions, such as Buddhism and the classical forms of Christianity, although it has no place in others, including Judaism, Islam, and Protestantism. Many religious virtues—such as love, self-control, compassion, non-violence, and wisdom—appear in more than one religion, but differences in belief systems can give varying significance to these virtues. All the historic religions address the need for individual holiness in some form and can point to saints, mystics, or spiritual exemplars who fully embody the ideals of their traditions.
Modernity has posed acute challenges to traditional religions. In the 1960s membership in mainstream Christian denominations began to decline, and candidates for the priesthood were less numerous. For a large number of people in modern societies, religion is neither good nor bad but simply irrelevant, given the many alternative ways to find meaning in various forms of cultural pursuits, ethical ideals, and lifestyles. These challenges to religion are partly a result of the prestige of science. The sciences describe a universe without reference to deities, the soul, or spiritual meaning. In addition, critical studies of biblical history have demonstrated that the Bible is not unique among ancient religious and historical documents. For example, the biblical stories of the Garden of Eden and the Deluge (universal flood) are common to other ancient Middle Eastern religions. Other factors that have contributed to a decline in religious participation in the modern world include the presentation of religion as a pre-scientific form of superstitious thinking, as a source of political control and divisiveness, as a confirmation of established patriarchal values, or as an emotional crutch. In addition, many families are no longer able to maintain stable religious traditions because they are disconnected from traditional, supportive religions or as a result of mixed or nonreligious marriages. Another influence has been the loss of community and social commitment that has followed in the wake of increased mobility. Frequent changes of location can result in a sense of impermanence or instability. This is particularly true of a move from town to city, which often results in the loss of stable community structure. Social uprooting can lead to religious uprooting because religious affiliation is closely related to social ties.
Despite all these factors, religion has not disappeared, and in many places it is thriving. Although secularization has had its effects, religion has been kept alive as a result, in part, of the adaptation of religion to secular values; the repositioning of conservative religion in direct opposition to secular values; and the emergence of new religious movements that meet the specific and diverse spiritual needs of people in contemporary society.
In many instances, religion has been able to adapt to modernity by accommodating the diversity of contemporary culture. Many religious traditions have broadened the concept of God to allow for the coexistence of various faiths, have
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acknowledged gender equality by ordaining women, and have adopted outward characteristics of modern culture in general. Many groups have benefited from the use of electronic media and networking, and some have developed religious functions for the Internet, including electronic prayer groups. Modern marketing techniques have been employed to increase membership. Many churches incorporate the latest kinds of support groups, counselling techniques, and popular music.
Control questions:
1.What is religion?
2.How can you explain the human necessity in religion?
3.What do you know about Christianity?
4.What are the main rules in Muslim religion?
5.What features can you mention in Buddhism?
PART 3: PRACTICE COURSE
THE LIST OF THEMES FOR WRITING ESSAYS ON PHILOSOPHY
MODULE 1
1.Philosophy of Buddhism.
2.Philosophy of Confucius.
3.Philosophy of Ancient Greek Thinkers
(Thales, Anaximenes, Anaximander, Heraclitus).
4.Two opposite views in ancient philosophy (Democritus and Plato).
5.Philosophy of Aristotle.
6.Philosophy of Socrates.
7.Philosophy of Ancient Rome Thinkers (Seneca and Lucretius).
8.Philosophical trends of medieval society.
9.Philosophy of Thomas Aquinas.
10.Philosophical trends of Revival epoch.
11.Philosophy of Leonardo de Vinci.
12.English philosophical materialism of the 16-17th centuries (Bacon, Hobbes, Locke).
13.Rationalism in European philosophy of the 17-18th centuries (Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz).
14.French materialism of the 18th century (Lametri, Didro, Helvetsyi, Holbakh).
15.English idealism of the 18th century (Berkeley, Hume).
16.Philosophy of Kant.
17.Philosophy of Hegel.
18.Philosophy of Feuerbach.
19.The origin and development of Marxist philosophy.
20.Ukrainian Philosophers (Scovoroda, Yurkevich and Shevchenko).
21.The development of philosophy in Russia (XVIIIXX centuries).
22.Philosophy of Neo-Positivism.
23.Philosophy of Neo-Thomism.
24.Philosophy of Existentialism.
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