School
Philosophical anarchism
Overview
Philosophical anarchism is an anarchist school of thought which focuses on intellectual criticism of authority, especially political power, and the legitimacy of governments. The American anarchist and socialist Benjamin Tucker coined the term philosophical anarchism to distinguish peaceful evolutionary anarchism from revolutionary variants. Although philosophical anarchism does not necessarily imply any action or desire for the elimination of authority, philosophical anarchists do not believe that they have an obligation or duty to obey any authority or conversely that the state or any individual has a right to command. Philosophical anarchism is a component especially of individualist anarchism.
Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).
Possible passages
Found by search and not yet checked by a person; they may only mention the idea in passing.
Reason became the sole measure of everything. It was the time when, as Hegel says, the world stood upon its head;[1] first, in the sense that the human head, and the principles arrived at by its thought, claimed to be the basis of all human action and association; but by and by, also, in the wider sense that the reality which was in contradiction to these principles had, in fact, to be turned upside down. Every form…
Friedrich Engels, Socialism, Utopian and Scientific
Close in meaning to Philosophical anarchism; the term itself is not named.
Although, then, Philosophy can be divided only into two main parts, the theoretical and the practical, and although all that we may be able to say of the special principles of Judgement must be counted as belonging in it to the theoretical part, _i.e._ to rational cognition in accordance with natural concepts; yet the Critique of pure Reason, which must decide all this, as regards the possibility of the system…
Immanuel Kant, Kant's Critique of Judgement
States what Philosophical anarchism is.
Hence the conception of progress as a ruling idea; the conception of the individual as the source and standard of rights; and the problem of knowledge, were all born together. Given the freed individual, who feels called upon to create a new heaven and a new earth, and who feels himself gifted with the power to perform the task to which he is called:--and the demand for science, for a method of discovering and…
John Dewey, The Influence of Darwin on Philosophy, and other essays in contemporary thought
States what Philosophical anarchism is.
Philosophers who discussed Philosophical anarchism
Related ideas
- Max Stirner
- Anarchism
- William Godwin
- Individualist anarchism
- Benjamin Tucker
- Michael Huemer
- A. John Simmons
Place in the tradition
Part of Anarchism.