10 Examples of Philosophical Essay

The philosophical essay is a textual composition in prose in which a problem typical of the field of philosophy and its incidence in other areas of knowledge is addressed, analyzed and argued in a reflexive manner. The topics in this area cover almost all of the concerns of the human being for his existence, his origin and the transcendental aspects of life, that is, what is beyond appearances, such as the love, the friendship, death, the moral, human behavior, the transcendence of being, among others. For example:The resistanceby Ernesto Sabato.

This type of trial It consists of presenting in a structured way a argumentation logic for or against a thesis, linking data that support the author's postulates. In other words, the philosophical essay is transparent in terms of showing the ideology of the writer. Its ordering and the relationship between the ideas must be extremely clear and coherent.

Philosophical essays have been of great importance throughout history because they have established bases for the formation

morals, ethics, political, social and scientific of man, being these topics applied in all branches of knowledge. This is how it is estimated that classic works by philosophers such as Plato, Saint Thomas Aquinas, Thomas More, Karl Marx, Bertrand Russell, Adam Smith, Saint Augustine, among many others, are still in force and are used with great assertiveness on problems current.

• See also: Essay Types

Characteristics of the philosophical essay

The philosophical essay seeks to expose personal ideas regarding a topic by supporting a thesis, refuting or reflectively analyzing said issue. The desirable characteristics in a philosophical essay are:

• Original look. The philosophical essay must contain a singular theme or approach. Being the philosophical topics very approached throughout history, one who pretends to be relevant must have a position different from everything that has been said before and that can contribute to the field of knowledge and the progress of sciences.
• Argumentation. The philosophical essay must have ideas with a basis logic and strict, to support the exposed thesis. It must also demonstrate high quality in terms of the debate and the presentation of arguments that are proposed. Many trials of this type raise the dialogue with ideas of the past to refute or update them according to later points of view.
• Bibliographic inquiry. The philosophical essay must have a theoretical approach from the pre-existing frameworks. If you want to debate the idea of ​​romantic love, you should review the literature on the subject. and seek reflection frameworks that start from contemporary models to dialogue and interact with they.
• effects today. The philosophical essay must establish how the subject matter affects current ideas. Although it is not necessary to grant an anchorage in modernity, a look from the present can result in a proactive approach that generates changes in reality.

philosophical essay examples

1. Fragment of a philosophical essay on freedom

A free person, in principle, is a person who fully enjoys his rights and fully complies with his responsibilities. Among the definitions of freedom in the dictionary are, for example, the absence of conditions of slavery, prison or state coercion, so that freedom necessarily passes through the agreement with the own will. However, freedom cannot be understood as the absolute enjoyment of one's own desire.

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1. Fragment of a philosophical essay on love

The material and organic explanation of a psychic phenomenon leaves little room to contemplate its nuances and complexity. Is love really a feeling of well-being and satisfaction? You would have to ask the jealous Othello or the lovers of Verona, Romeo and Juliet, willing to die rather than be without each other. The experience of love, then, cannot be reduced to its physiological explanation, just as the transition from organized matter to life itself cannot be explained.

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1. Fragment of a philosophical essay on beauty

Seen this way, one might think that beauty is not found in the dimensions of the observed object, but in the mental, emotional or cultural considerations of the subject that observes it. Only in this way is it explained that the same object can be beautiful in one culture and unpleasant in another, or in one era and the next. Examples abound, but perhaps none are as obvious as in the case of abstract art: a painting by the American painter Jackson Pollock can be very pleasing to the eye. view for those of us who today appreciate its apparent chaos and agile strokes, but during the Renaissance it would have been unthinkable and possibly considered as a canvas wasted.

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1. Fragment of a philosophical essay on death

The closest experience to death that we ordinarily have is sleep. That is, the act of sleeping. We have all experienced the blurring of consciousness that leads to the dream world, and we know that in Sometimes that experience of emptiness may not be full of dreams and fantasies, but simply be the any. The unawareness. The absence of self-perceptions. No one is aware of himself and his surroundings while sleeping, but at the same time indulges in sleep sure that he's going to wake up again (even if he doesn't, which is often a possibility). So why doesn't sleep cause us the same anguish that death causes us?

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1. Essay Fragment Is literature useful? by Georges Bataille

Nothing is more common today than political poetry. It unfolds in the secrecy in which it intends to survive. I would like to state below a first principle. It is not possible that there is anything human that should not be tried, that does not deserve and can be happily tried. I have before me an unpublished poem on the insurrection: everything that the rage of freedom makes pass through an eighteen-year-old head cries out in his verses: Let's hit the edge of the limits with our heads...

1. Essay Fragment music brain, by Daniel Levitin

As the musicologist David Hurón says, music is characterized both by its ubiquity and its antiquity. There is no culture, past or present, that is without music, and some of the oldest artifacts ever found in archaeological digs are musical instruments. Music is important in the daily lives of many people around the world, and has been throughout all of human history.

1. Essay Fragment On the Genealogy of Morality, by Friedrich Nietzsche

 The rebellion of the slaves in morality begins when resentment itself becomes creative and engenders values: the resentment of those beings to whom authentic reaction, the reaction of action, is forbidden, and who retaliate only with a vengeance imaginary While all noble morality is born from a triumphant yes said to oneself, slave morality says no, already in advance, to an “outside”, to an “other”, to a “not-me”; and that is not what constitutes its creative action.

1. Essay Fragment In defense of the mistake by Kathryn Schulz

To be fair, this serene faith that we are right is often justified. Most of us manage pretty well on a day-to-day basis, which indicates that we are routinely right about a lot of things. And sometimes not only in a normal way but spectacularly: about the existence of atoms (postulated by ancient thinkers thousands of years before the appearance of modern chemistry); on the healing properties of aspirin (recognized from the year 3000 a. c. at least); in keeping track of that woman who smiled at you in the cafe (now your wife of twenty years).

1. Essay Fragment Hunger, by Martin Caparros

We know hunger, we are used to hunger: we feel hungry two, three times a day. But between that repeated, daily, repeated and daily satiated hunger that we live, and the desperate hunger of those who cannot cope with it, there is a world. Hunger has always been the reason for social changes, technical progress, revolutions, counter-revolutions. Nothing has influenced more in the history of mankind. No disease, no war has killed more people. Still, no plague is as lethal and, at the same time, as avoidable as famine.

1. Essay Fragment Treatise on Tolerance, by Voltaire

It is well known how much it has cost since the Christians dispute over the dogma: it has run blood, whether on the gallows or on the battlefields, from the fourth century to ours days. Let us limit ourselves here to the wars and horrors which the quarrels of the Reformation have provoked, and see what their source has been in France. Perhaps a summary and faithful picture of so many calamities will open the eyes of some uninstructed people and move upright hearts.

Interactive test to practice

Follow with:

• Literary essay
• scientific essay
• critical essay
• descriptive essay
• Argumentative essay