PHI 2000 Lecture Notes - Lecture 38: Meta-Ethics, Jean-Paul Sartre, Existentialism
Document Summary
These questions are often called meta-ethical: ethical questions: Is humility a virtue: meta-ethical questions: ask about the conditions for there to be ethics at all. Does ethnics require divine backing or not. Existentialism is a humanism: speech delivered in 1945, humanist. Because it starts by asking, what is a human being? . And because his existentialism is atheistic: existentalist. He makes existence the key to that question. Key terms: essence and existence: freedom & responsibility. Essence: the basic concept(s) that answer the question what is it? , what you would find in a definition, a description of the purpose of a thing: Existence: reality as lived out in time, through acts and events, bringing new things into being in the future, through. Acting= creating new projects: concrete examples of things. Made according to a certain concept: you can define it. Made for a certain purpose: you can answer the question. Tools only exist because an idea of them came first.
