Philosophers Essay Examples

In his novel The Stranger, Albert Camus expresses his philosophy of the absurd: The irrationality of the universe, the meaninglessness of human life, the “importance” of the physical world. Camus is too concerned with the creation of meaning in a meaningless world through the process of living life. The novel is a first-person account of […]

Progressive education promotes the idea that learners should be come independent thinkers but also creative individuals who can also express their feelings. It is not only about putting accumulating knowledge but it also about learners knowing how to think for themselves and not only rely on rote learning. Continuity and interaction are embedded in the […]

The growth of private Christian education, encompassing Christian day schools and homeschooling, has been extraordinary in the last thirty years. This endeavor has yielded notable outcomes, as indicated by standardized test scores consistently revealing that students in private Christian education outperform their counterparts in public schools. Reports indicate that all homeschool students who applied to […]

Having no background on what the article “The Six Hour D… and How to Avoid It” by Professor Dewey is about leaves your mind guessing until you get around to reading it. This article is about study habits amongst college students. It discusses how many students claim to have spent a substantial amount of time […]

For John Dewey, education and democracy are intimately connected. According to Dewey good education should have both a societal purpose and purpose for the individual student. For Dewey, the long-term matters, but so does the short-term quality of an educational experience. Dewey criticizes traditional education for lacking in holistic understanding of students and designing curricula […]

The Ethics of Democracy was a short article written by John Dewey. He wrote was an extraordinary thinker and provided us today with ideas that are still in action. I decided to write on this article specifically because I am very interested in the founding of the United States and how our founding fathers chose […]

Would Dewey’s advice for correcting a bad habit work for you? How would you go about reforming one of your habits? According to John Dewey, Habits are inevitable. We are empowered by both good and bad habits. In his essay, “Habits and Will”, Dewey states that we envision bad habits as such acts of “foolish […]

Albert Bandura is a philosopher who came up with the Social Learning theory which states that people learn from each other in a social context through observation, modeling and imitation. Bandura’s theory is considered to be a bridge between the cognitive learning and behaviorist’s theory. The central values of Bandura’s theory are based on the […]

What does Michele Foucault mean by deployment of sexuality? Part four of the book on History of Sexuality speaks of the deployment of sexuality (HS 75ff). It is said here that deployment of sexuality is a disciplinary apparatus which concerns power. Many regard this work as a straightforward extension of the genealogical approach of Discipline […]

Max Weber has claimed that power arises when given two people in a social relationship one will try to get himself in a better position to enforce his will on the other despite any form of resistance.   This then assumes that there is conflict between these two parties in the social relationship as both try […]

Panopticism Michael Foucault’s essay Panopticism was written much differently than other essays that I have read. Panopticism is intended to be, as mentioned by Hunter, a “meticulous tactical partitioning” (pg. 212). Foucault writes in such a different style then most of the authors that I have studied. He uses unique grammar and sentence structures that […]

Although Foucault’s work exhibits both consistent themes and shifts in direction and development, some critiques have highlighted disruptions, divergences, and gaps within his body of work. After the Archaeology of Knowledge and the cultural and political event known as May 68 in France, there appears to be a shift of emphasis in writings. Archaeology is […]

The general belief that scientific analysis is a means by which the world is to be known ‘truly’, ‘rationally’ and ‘progressively’ come to eminence during the late 18th century with the ‘Age of Enlightenment’ (Giddens 1987; Foucault 1970). This meant that as on the one hand, the biomedical model of explaining disease rose and became […]

The Enlightenment has frequently provided the context or impetus for a number of contemporary analyses in critical theory. The period of the Enlightenment, perhaps above any other, has been an attractive topic to a number of different theorists from various European countries and theoretical schools. Brewer, writing about Diderot, identifies “[w]hat is contemporary about the […]

In the text “What is an Author?” Michel Foucault tries to determine the relationship between an author and a text furthermore he deals with the writing itself and the definition of a work itself.Before Foucault investigates these subjects he refers to a quotation ofSamuel Beckett: “What does it matter who is speaking?”Foucault sees this sentence […]

Built signifiers concept and frame significances ( Dovey 1999, 12 ). The environment can therefore be honoring and gratifying and supply range for single development, like a university campus ; or it can be inhibitory and stabbing, like a prison. What is evident from this is not merely that reinforced elements respond to their physical […]

‘Wherever power exists, there is also opposition, and yet, this opposition is never separate from power itself’ (Foucault, 1978: 95-96). In the study of human sciences, the relationship between opposition and power has always been a major concern. Power acknowledges the existence of opposition, and in turn, opposition validates the presence of power. However, before […]

The book “The Archaeology of Knowledge” by Foucault offers a comprehensive analysis of his methodology, exploring concepts such as discourse, enunciative modes, constructs, schemes, and statements (Lindgren 2000:294). According to Foucault (cited in Hall 1997:44), ‘discourse’ refers to a group of statements that represent knowledge about a specific subject at a particular historical moment. Discourse […]

Michel Foucault’s study of Velazquez’s Las Meninas (1) was first published in the volume Les Mots et les choses in 1966 which was followed, in 1970, by the English translation titled The Order of Things. In “Las Meninas”, which is the title of the opening chapter of The Order of Things, Foucault focused on the […]

Michel Foucault argues that the expulsion of lepers and containment of the plague, in relation to Panopticism, do not have the same political vision. He suggests that people use power and knowledge to create a perfectly governed society, which he calls a “political dream.” However, this perception of the political dream has changed over time […]

Much as the issue on sexuality remains an unresolved conflict among medical experts, religious and judicial authorities, and hermaphrodites themselves under austere criticism in the 19th century, the search for identity in terms of “true sex” seems far from leaving the mystery which a French rural child of the mid-1900s had originally brought forth. On […]

As being developed by poststructuralism, feminism, lesbian & gay studies and even American pragmatist theory (Parker,2001; Seidman,1997), queer theory has become one of the most important theories, which contributes to the research of sociology, arts and organizations. On the one hand, queer theory has been used to study the relations between the sexuality, gender and […]