Results for 'Pessimism'

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Bibliography: Pessimism in Normative Ethics
  1.  47
    Weltschmerz: Pessimism in German Philosophy, 1860–1900.Frederick C. Beiser - 2016 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press UK.
    Weltschmerz is a study of the pessimism that dominated German philosophy in the second half of the nineteenth century. Pessimism was essentially the theory that life is not worth living, and was introduced into German philosophy by Schopenhauer. Frederick C. Beiser examines the intense and long controversy that arose from Schopenhauer's pessimism, which changed the agenda of philosophy in Germany away from the logic of the sciences and toward an examination of the value of life. He examines (...)
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  2. The pessimistic induction and the exponential growth of science reassessed.K. Brad Wray - 2013 - Synthese 190 (18):4321-4330.
    My aim is to evaluate a new realist strategy for addressing the pessimistic induction, Ludwig Fahrbach’s (Synthese 180:139–155, 2011) appeal to the exponential growth of science. Fahrbach aims to show that, given the exponential growth of science, the history of science supports realism. I argue that Fahrbach is mistaken. I aim to show that earlier generations of scientists could construct a similar argument, but one that aims to show that the theories that they accepted are likely true. The problem with (...)
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  3.  15
    Pessimism in Kant's Ethics and Rational Religion.Dennis Vanden Auweele - 2018 - Lanham: Lexington Books.
    Dennis Vanden Auweele explores Kant’s moral and religious philosophy and shows that a pessimistic undercurrent pervades them. This provides a new vantage point not only to comprehensively assess Kantian philosophy, but also to provide much needed context and reading assistance to the general premises of Kant's philosophy and rationality.
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  4. Pessimistic Inductions: Four Varieties.K. Brad Wray - 2015 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (1):61-73.
    The pessimistic induction plays an important role in the contemporary realism/anti-realism debate in philosophy of science. But there is some disagreement about the structure and aim of the argument. And a number of scholars have noted that there is more than one type of PI in the philosophical literature. I review four different versions of the PI. I aim to show that PIs have been appealed to by philosophers of science for a variety of reasons. Even some realists have appealed (...)
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  5. A Pessimistic Induction against Scientific Antirealism.Seungbae Park - 2014 - Organon F: Medzinárodný Časopis Pre Analytickú Filozofiu 21 (1):3-21.
    There are nine antirealist explanations of the success of science in the literature. I raise difficulties against all of them except the latest one, and then construct a pessimistic induction that the latest one will turn out to be problematic because its eight forerunners turned out to be problematic. This pessimistic induction is on a par with the traditional pessimistic induction that successful present scientific theories will be revealed to be false because successful past scientific theories were revealed to be (...)
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  6. Hopeful Pessimism: The Kantian Mind at the End of All Things.Andrew Chignell - 2023 - In Katerina Mihaylova & Anna Ezekiel (eds.), Hope and the Kantian Legacy: New Contributions to the History of Optimism. London, Vereinigtes Königreich: Bloomsbury Academic. pp. 35-52.
    Kant’s third question (“What may I hope?”) is underdiscussed in comparison to the other two, even though he himself took it to be the question that united his efforts in theoretical and practical philosophy. This is largely his own fault: in his discussion of the question he moves quickly from talking about rational hope to discussing the kind of Belief or faith (Glaube) that grounds it. Moreover, the canonical statements of his own moral proof do not seem to give hope (...)
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  7. The Pessimistic Induction and the Golden Rule.Seungbae Park - 2018 - Problemos 93:70-80.
    Nickles (2017) advocates scientific antirealism by appealing to the pessimistic induction over scientific theories, the illusion hypothesis (Quoidbach, Gilbert, and Wilson, 2013), and Darwin’s evolutionary theory. He rejects Putnam’s (1975: 73) no-miracles argument on the grounds that it uses inference to the best explanation. I object that both the illusion hypothesis and evolutionary theory clash with the pessimistic induction and with his negative attitude towards inference to the best explanation. I also argue that Nickles’s positive philosophical theories are subject to (...)
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  8. Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit.Joshua Foa Dienstag - 2009 - Princeton University Press.
    Pessimism claims an impressive following--from Rousseau, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche, to Freud, Camus, and Foucault. Yet "pessimist" remains a term of abuse--an accusation of a bad attitude--or the diagnosis of an unhappy psychological state. Pessimism is thought of as an exclusively negative stance that inevitably leads to resignation or despair. Even when pessimism looks like utter truth, we are told that it makes the worst of a bad situation. Bad for the individual, worse for the species--who would actually (...)
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  9. Pessimism and procreation.Daniel Pallies - 2023 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 108 (3):751-771.
    The pessimistic hypothesis is the hypothesis that life is bad for us, in the sense that we are worse off for having come into existence. Suppose this hypothesis turns out to be correct — existence turns out to be more of a burden than a gift. A natural next thought is that we should stop having children. But I contend that this is a mistake; procreation would often be permissible even if the pessimistic hypothesis turned out to be correct. Roughly, (...)
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  10. The Pessimistic Induction: A Bad Argument Gone Too Far.Moti Mizrahi - 2013 - Synthese 190 (15):3209-3226.
    In this paper, I consider the pessimistic induction construed as a deductive argument (specifically, reductio ad absurdum) and as an inductive argument (specifically, inductive generalization). I argue that both formulations of the pessimistic induction are fallacious. I also consider another possible interpretation of the pessimistic induction, namely, as pointing to counterexamples to the scientific realist’s thesis that success is a reliable mark of (approximate) truth. I argue that this interpretation of the pessimistic induction fails, too. If this is correct, then (...)
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  11.  68
    Dark Matters: Pessimism and the Problem of Suffering.Mara van der Lugt - 2021 - Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
    An intellectual history of the philosophers who grappled with the problem of evil, and the case for why pessimism still holds moral value for us today In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, philosophers engaged in heated debates on the question of how God could have allowed evil and suffering in a creation that is supposedly good. Dark Matters traces how the competing philosophical traditions of optimism and pessimism arose from early modern debates about the problem of evil, and (...)
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  12.  90
    Testimonial Pessimism.Rachel Elizabeth Fraser - 2018 - In Matthew A. Benton, John Hawthorne & Dani Rabinowitz (eds.), Knowledge, Belief, and God: New Insights in Religious Epistemology. Oxford: Oxford University Press. pp. 203-227.
  13.  32
    Schopenhauer, Pessimism and Suicide.Dennis Vanden Auweele - 2014 - Tijdschrift Voor Filosofie 76 (2):307-330.
    Schopenhauer’s argument against suicide is typically received negatively in the scholarly literature, insofar that it appears to be one of the numerous inconsistencies that haunt his philosophical system. Thus, after elaborating upon the unique characteristics of Schopenhauer’s argument against suicide, I will discuss the well-known objection to it. By offering a fresh outlook on Schopenhauer’s ethics, I will suggest a new way of appreciating Schopenhauer’s argument so as to rehabilitate his understanding of suicide within the framework of his pessimistic philosophy. (...)
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  14. Motivational pessimism and motivated cognition.Stephen Gadsby - 2024 - Synthese 203 (4):1-18.
    I introduce and discuss an underappreciated form of motivated cognition: motivational pessimism, which involves the biasing of beliefs for the sake of self-motivation. I illustrate how motivational pessimism avoids explanatory issues that plague other (putative) forms of motivated cognition and discuss distinctions within the category, related to awareness, aetiology, and proximal goals.
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  15.  35
    A 'Pessimism of Strength': Nietzsche and the Tragic Sublime.Jim Urpeth - 2011 - In .
    In relation to the overall theme of the collection in which this paper appears, namely, Nietzsche and the 'future of the human' I offer a reading of Nietzsche's "The Birth of Tragedy" to argue for the key role of art in relation to Nietzsche's project of 'overcoming the human'. It is argued that Nietzsche credits the pre-Socratic Greeks, and in particular their tragic dramas, with achieving a 'transvaluation' of the optimism/pessimism distinction and thereby promoting an overcoming of the man/nature (...)
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  16.  14
    Pessimism in Kant and Schopenhauer. On the Horror of Existence.Dennis Vanden Auweele - 2014 - Dissertation, Ku Leuven
    The historical period of the 18th and early 19th century is usually perceived as the high point of human self-emancipatory optimism. Specifically, the Enlightenment believed that reason would guide humanity from darkness to the light. Ay, there's the rub, so rhymes the Bard of Avon, for wherefrom arriveth the urge to flee the dark? The rationalist propensity to remodel and re-invent the world is testament to a dreary and pessimistic analysis of the human condition. Thus, the Enlightenment made a largely (...)
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  17. Being pessimistic about the objective present.Derek Lam - 2020 - Synthese (12):1-16.
    Some philosophers argue that non-presentist A-theories problematically imply that we cannot know that this moment is present. The problem is usually presented as arising from the combination of the A-theoretic ideology of a privileged presentness and a non-presentist ontology. The goal of this essay is to show that the epistemic problem can be rephrased as a pessimistic induction. By doing so, I will show that the epistemic problem, in fact, stems from the A-theoretic ideology alone. Hence, once it is properly (...)
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  18.  39
    Taking Pessimism Seriously.Ian James Kidd - 2024 - Daily Philosophy.
    I note the ambivalence of contemporary attitudes towards pessimism, then offer a way of thinking about philosophical forms of pessimism, intended to encourage us to take pessimism seriously as a stance on the human condition.
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  19.  20
    Kantian Transcendental Pessimism and Jamesian Empirical Meliorism.Sami Pihlström - 2020 - Con-Textos Kantianos 1 (11):313-335.
    Kant’s philosophy was an important background for the pragmatist tradition, even though some of the major classical pragmatists, especially William James, were unwilling to acknowledge their debt to Kant. This essay considers the relation between Kant and James from the perspective of their conceptions of the human condition. In particular, I examine their sha red pessimism, employing Vanden Auweele’s recent analysis of Kant’s pessimism and arguing that this is required by James’s meliorism. A comparative inquiry into Kant’s and (...)
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  20.  18
    German pessimism and Indian philosophy: a hermeneutic reading.Johann Joachim Gestering - 1986 - Delhi: Ajanta Books International.
  21. (1 other version)Schopenhauer's Pessimism.Byron Simmons - 2023 - In David Bather Woods & Timothy Stoll (eds.), The Schopenhauerian mind. New York, NY: Routledge. pp. 282-296.
    Optimism and pessimism are two diametrically opposed views about the value of existence. Optimists maintain that existence is better than non-existence, while pessimists hold that it is worse. Arthur Schopenhauer put forward a variety of arguments against optimism and for pessimism. I will offer a synoptic reading of these arguments, which aims to show that while Schopenhauer’s case against optimism primarily focuses on the value or disvalue of life’s contents, his case for pessimism focuses on the ways (...)
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  22. Pessimism, Political Critique, and the Contingently Bad Life.Patrick O'Donnell - 2022 - Journal of Philosophy of Life 12 (1):77-100.
    It is widely believed that philosophical pessimism is committed to fatalism about the sufferings that characterize the human condition, and that it encourages resignation and withdrawal from the political realm in response. This paper offers an explanation for and argument against this perception by distinguishing two functions that pessimism can serve. Pessimism’s skeptical mode suggests that fundamental cross-cultural constraints on the human condition bar us from the good life (however defined). These constraints are often represented as immune (...)
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  23.  9
    Schopenhauer: pessimist and pagan.Vivian Jerauld McGill - 1931 - New York,: Haskell House.
    A major biography of the 19th century German philosopher of the pessimistic school. Although a number of biographies of Schopenhauer had been published in German, this was the first major biography of him in some 40 years to appear in English, & the author had to rely to a large extent on primary & secondary sources in the German language. Illus.
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  24.  42
    The pessimistic origin of Nietzsche’s thought of eternal recurrence.Scott Jenkins - 2020 - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 63 (1):20-41.
    In this article I argue that we should understand Nietzsche’s doctrine of eternal recurrence as the ideal of life affirmation opposed to philosophical pessimism, the view that life is not worth living. I first articulate Nietzsche’s psychological account of pessimism as a vengeful focus on the past and an aversion to time understood as transience. I then consider the question of why a person with the opposite psychological orientation – a creative relation to the future and an endorsement (...)
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  25. Why Should We Be Pessimistic about Antirealists and Pessimists?Seungbae Park - 2017 - Foundations of Science 22 (3):613-625.
    The pessimistic induction over scientific theories holds that present theories will be overthrown as were past theories. The pessimistic induction over scientists holds that present scientists cannot conceive of future theories just as past scientists could not conceive of present theories. The pessimistic induction over realists :4321–4330, 2013) holds that present realists are wrong about present theories just as past realists were wrong about past theories. The pessimistic induction over antirealist theories :3–21, 2014) holds that the latest antirealist explanation of (...)
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  26. The Pessimistic Meta-induction: Obsolete Through Scientific Progress?Florian Müller - 2015 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 29 (4):393-412.
    Recently, Fahrbach and Park have argued that the pessimistic meta-induction about scientific theories is unsound. They claim that this very argument does not properly take into account scientific progress, particularly during the twentieth century. They also propose amended arguments in favour of scientific realism, which are supposed to properly reflect the history of science. I try to show that what I call the argument from scientific progress cannot explain satisfactorily why the current theories should have reached a degree of success (...)
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  27.  16
    Political Pessimism and the Seductions of Tyranny.J. Jeremy Wisnewski - 2022 - Philosophy in the Contemporary World 28 (2):34-41.
    These remarks consider Andrew Fiala’s Tyranny from Trump to Plato in the context of political apathy and climate pessimism. First, I raise the issue of whether or not some form of tyranny might be necessary in dealing with the crisis of climate change. Second, I express some skepticism about Fiala’s dual remedies of moral education (Ch 8) and constitutional wisdom (Ch 9) to face our present political challenges.
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  28. Pessimists, pollyannas, and the new compatibilism.Paul Russell - 2001 - In Robert Kane (ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Free Will. New York: Oxford University Press.
    THE aim of this chapter is to offer a critical examination of some recent contributions to compatibilist literature on freedom and responsibility that aim to provide broadly reasons-responsive accounts of moral agency. Although the views of several authors will be considered, discussion will be organized primarily around Daniel Dennett's "Elbow Room" (1984), an important work in the evolution of the "new compatibilism.".
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  29.  4
    Aspects of pessimism.Robert Mark Wenley - 1894 - Edinburgh: W. Blackwood & Sons.
    Jewish pessimism.--Medieval mysticism.--Hamlet.--The pessimistic element in Goethe.--Berkeley, Kant, and Schopenhauer.--Pessimism as a system.
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  30. Pessimism.George W. Harris - 2002 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 5 (3):271-286.
    The problem of pessimism is the secular analogue to the evidential problem of evil facing traditional theism. The traditional theist must argue two things: that the evidence shows that this is on balance a good world and that it is the best possible world. Though the secular optimist who advocates any form of secular moral theory need not argue that the current and future world will likely be the best possible world, she nonetheless must argue that were there a (...)
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  31. A Confutation of the Pessimistic Induction.Seungbae Park - 2010 - Journal for General Philosophy of Science / Zeitschrift für Allgemeine Wissenschaftstheorie 42 (1):75-84.
    The pessimistic induction holds that successful past scientific theories are completely false, so successful current ones are completely false too. I object that past science did not perform as poorly as the pessimistic induction depicts. A close study of the history of science entitles us to construct an optimistic induction that would neutralize the pessimistic induction. Also, even if past theories were completely false, it does not even inductively follow that the current theories will also turn out to be completely (...)
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  32. Global and Local Pessimistic Meta-inductions.Samuel Ruhmkorff - 2013 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 27 (4):409-428.
    The global pessimistic meta-induction argues from the falsity of scientific theories accepted in the past to the likely falsity of currently accepted scientific theories. I contend that this argument commits a statistical error previously unmentioned in the literature and is self-undermining. I then compare the global pessimistic meta-induction to a local pessimistic meta-induction based on recent negative assessments of the reliability of medical research. If there is any future in drawing pessimistic conclusions from the history of science, it lies in (...)
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  33. What Pessimism Is.Paul Prescott - 2012 - Journal of Philosophical Research 37:337-356.
    On the standard view, pessimism is a philosophically intractable topic. Against the standard view, I hold that pessimism is a stance, or compound of attitudes, commitments and intentions. This stance is marked by certain beliefs—first and foremost, that the bad prevails over the good—which are subject to an important qualifying condition: they are always about outcomes and states of affairs in which one is personally invested. This serves to distinguish pessimism from other views with which it is (...)
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  34. (1 other version)Optimism about the pessimistic induction.Sherrilyn Roush - 2009 - In P. D. Magnus & Jacob Busch (eds.), New waves in philosophy of science. New York: Palgrave-Macmillan. pp. 29-58.
    How confident does the history of science allow us to be about our current well-tested scientific theories, and why? The scientific realist thinks we are well within our rights to believe our best-tested theories, or some aspects of them, are approximately true.2 Ambitious arguments have been made to this effect, such as that over historical time our scientific theories are converging to the truth, that the retention of concepts and claims is evidence for this, and that there can be no (...)
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  35.  56
    Baseball, pessimistic inductions and the turnover fallacy.Marc Lange - 2002 - Analysis 62 (4):281-285.
    Among the niftiest arguments for scientific anti-realism is the ‘pessimistic induction’ (also sometimes called ‘the disastrous historical meta-induction’). Although various versions of this argument differ in their details (see, for example, Poincare 1952: 160, Putnam 1978: 25, and Laudan 1981), the argument generally begins by recalling the many scientific theories that posit unobservable entities and that at one time or another were widely accepted. The anti-realist then argues that when these old theories were accepted, the evidence for them was quite (...)
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  36.  7
    A feeling of wrongness: pessimistic rhetoric on the fringes of popular culture.Joseph Packer - 2018 - University Park, Pennsylvania: The Pennsylvania State University Press. Edited by Ethan Stoneman.
    Examines case studies of popular culture as pessimistic rhetorical artifacts, and how non-traditional modes of argumentation can work rhetorically to overcome biases against pessimistic messaging"--Provided by publisher.
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  37. Forgivingness, pessimism, and environmental citizenship.Kathryn J. Norlock - 2010 - Journal of Agricultural and Environmental Ethics 23 (1-2):29-42.
    Our attitudes toward human culpability for environmental problems have moral and emotional import, influencing our basic capacities for believing cooperative action and environmental repair are even possible. In this paper, I suggest that having the virtue of forgivingness as a response to environmental harm is generally good for moral character, preserving us from morally risky varieties of pessimism and despair. I define forgivingness as a forward-looking disposition based on Robin Dillon’s conception of preservative forgiveness, a preparation to be deeply (...)
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  38. From the Pessimistic Induction to Semantic Antirealism.Greg Frost-Arnold - 2011 - Philosophy of Science 78 (5):1131-1142.
    The Pessimistic Induction (PI) states: most past scientific theories were radically mistaken; therefore, current theories are probably similarly mistaken. But mistaken in what way? On the usual understanding, such past theories are false. However, on widely held views about reference and presupposition, many theoretical claims of previous scientific theories are neither true nor false. And if substantial portions of past theories are truth-valueless, then the PI leads to semantic antirealism. But most current philosophers of science reject semantic antirealism. So PI (...)
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  39.  11
    Pessimistic aesthetics and the re-valuation of guilty pleasures: on the moral and metaphysical significance of escapism.Drew M. Dalton - 2024 - Journal of Aesthetics and Culture 16 (1):1-11.
    There is a previously unrecognized coupling which underlies the Western evaluation of aesthetic experiences. By and large, we are taught that for our aesthetic pleasures to have any “value” (i.e. to be good) they must do more than merely entertain, distract, or delight. Instead, they should confront us with some “truth” about the nature of our existence and/or guide us to some “reality” concerning the state of our world. This paper asks: 1) whence this prejudice concerning the value of our (...)
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  40. What Pessimism about Moral Deference Means for Disagreement.James Fritz - 2018 - Ethical Theory and Moral Practice 21 (1):121-136.
    Many writers have recently argued that there is something distinctively problematic about sustaining moral beliefs on the basis of others’ moral views. Call this claim pessimism about moral deference. Pessimism about moral deference, if true, seems to provide an attractive way to argue for a bold conclusion about moral disagreement: moral disagreement generally does not require belief revision. Call this claim steadfastness about moral disagreement. Perhaps the most prominent recent discussion of the connection between moral deference and moral (...)
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  41.  15
    Utopian Pessimist: The Life and Thought of Simone Weil.David McLellan - 1990 - Simon & Schuster.
    Examines the life and thought of the spiritual writer who fought in the Spanish Civil War, journeyed to Germany during the ascent of the Nazis, and worked to establish an immediate link between Christian and Greek thought.
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  42.  50
    Better than both: the case for pessimism.Peter Heinegg - 2005 - Lanham, Md.: Hamilton Books.
    This new work sees pessimism not as a kind of depressed moodiness or self-indulgent negativity, but as the inevitable result of any fair-minded survey of the world we actually live in.
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  43. Refutations of the Two Pessimistic Inductions.Seungbae Park - 2016 - Philosophia 44 (3):835-844.
    Both the pessimistic inductions over scientific theories and over scientists are built upon what I call proportional pessimism: as theories are discarded, the inductive rationale for concluding that the next theories will be discarded grows stronger. I argue that proportional pessimism clashes with the fact that present theories are more successful than past theories, and with the implications of the assumptions that there are finitely and infinitely many unconceived alternatives. Therefore, the two pessimistic inductions collapse along with proportional (...)
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  44. Miracles, pessimism and scientific realism.John Worrall - unknown
    Worrall argued that structural realism provides a ‘synthesis’ of the main pro-realist argument – the ‘No Miracles Argument’, and the main anti-realist argument – the ‘Pessimistic Induction’. More recently, however, it has been claimed that each of these arguments is an instance of the same probabilistic fallacy – sometimes called the ‘base-rate fallacy’. If correct, this clearly seems to undermine structural realism and Magnus and Callender have indeed claimed that both arguments are fallacious and ‘without [them] we lose the rationale (...)
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  45.  33
    Societal pessimism in Japan, the United States, and The Netherlands.Pepijn van Houwelingen - 2016 - Japanese Journal of Political Science 17 (3):427-450.
    This paper starts out with a theoretical argument, based on panel data, that public mood in general and societal pessimism in particular should be measured from an explicitly temporal perspective. Next, based on a survey among more than 200 Japanese students and a wide array of existing data sources in three different languages and covering several decades it is shown that public mood in three quite different countries – first and foremost Japan, but also the United States and The (...)
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  46. Nietzsche's Greek Pessimism.Daniel Wolt - forthcoming - Inquiry: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Philosophy 68.
    Despite his opposition to Schopenhauerian pessimism, Nietzsche repeatedly characterises himself as a pessimist of sorts. Here I attempt to take this assertion seriously and offer an interpretation of in what sense Nietzsche can be called a pessimist. I suggest that Nietzsche’s pessimism has to do not with life in general, but with life in its common form: such life is bad because it is characterised by meaningless suffering, and lacks aesthetic value. Against the Christian tradition, Nietzsche denies that (...)
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  47. The Grand Pessimistic Induction.Seungbae Park - 2018 - Review of Contemporary Philosophy 17:7-19.
    After decades of intense debate over the old pessimistic induction (Laudan, 1977; Putnam, 1978), it has now become clear that it has at least the following four problems. First, it overlooks the fact that present theories are more successful than past theories. Second, it commits the fallacy of biased statistics. Third, it erroneously groups together past theories from different fields of science. Four, it misses the fact that some theoretical components of past theories were preserved. I argue that these four (...)
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  48.  43
    Pragmatic Pessimism or on the “Dark Gray” of the World.Vilmar Debona - 2022 - Cuadernos de Pessimismo 1:236-248.
    How can a theory of happiness, based upon the practical use of reason and acquired character, be understood in the thought of Schopenhauer, the great pessimist metaphysic? This article aims to prove that Schopenhauer’s pessimism can be better understood if considered, on the one hand, as metaphysical pessimism and, on the other, as pragmatic pessimism. For this purpose, I seek to show that the consideration of Schopenhauer’s singular eudemonology is fundamental to fully understand his pessimism.
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  49. On Pessimism: A Study in Normative Psychology.Paul Prescott - 2012 - Dissertation, Syracuse University
    I aim to revive pessimism as a topic of discussion in the Anglo-American philosophical tradition. Toward that end, I defend a theory of pessimism designed to (a) locate pessimism within the existing Anglo-American philosophical literature and (b) to account for the epistemic and prudential conditions under which pessimism can be warranted. I argue for three theses: (1) that pessimism is a stance premised on a belief that the bad prevails over the good; (2) that (...) is not necessarily the product of an emotional problem, a character defect, or unjustifiable metaphysical assumptions; and (3) that pessimism can be prudentially appropriate and — perhaps most controversially — is often epistemically warranted. (shrink)
     
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  50. (1 other version)Pessimism and humanism in Mann, Thomas-an ethical reflection on humanitarianism and humanism.G. Pernechele - 1990 - Filosofia 41 (2):185-212.
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