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The term pessimism derives from the Latin word pessimus, meaning 'the worst'.It was first used by Jesuit critics of Voltaire's 1759 novel Candide, ou l'Optimisme.Voltaire was satirizing the philosophy of Leibniz who maintained that this was the 'best (optimum) of all possible worlds'.
Philosophical pessimism is a philosophical tradition which argues that life is not worth living and that non-existence is preferable to existence. Thinkers in this tradition emphasize that suffering outweighs pleasure, happiness is fleeting or unattainable, and existence itself does not hold inherent value or an intrinsic purpose.
Half a glass of water, illustration of two different mental attitudes, optimism (half full) and pessimism (half empty) Optimism is an attitude reflecting a belief or hope that the outcome of some specific endeavor, or outcomes in general, will be positive, favorable, and desirable.
Thinkers such as Julius Bahnsen, Eduard von Hartmann, Philipp Mainländer and others cultivated the ever-increasing threat of pessimism by converting Schopenhauer's transcendental idealism into what Frederick C. Beiser calls transcendental realism. [note 1] [1]: 213 The transcendental idealist thesis is that humans know only the appearances of ...
A sociological theory is a supposition that intends to consider, analyze, and/or explain objects of social reality from a sociological perspective, [1]: 14 drawing connections between individual concepts in order to organize and substantiate sociological knowledge.
For James, [2] meliorism stands in the middle between optimism and pessimism, and treats the salvation of the world as a probability rather than a certainty or impossibility. In the case of a meliorist praxis , the activist contemporary of the Pragmatists Jane Addams stripped progressive ideals of any elitist privilege calling for a "lateral ...
Cultural pessimism arises with the conviction that the culture of a nation, a civilization, or humanity itself is in a process of irreversible decline. It is a variety of pessimism formulated by a cultural critic .
In the philosophy of science, the pessimistic induction, also known as the pessimistic meta-induction, is an argument which seeks to rebut scientific realism, particularly the scientific realist's notion of epistemic optimism. The pessimistic meta-induction is the argument that if past successful and accepted scientific theories were found to ...