Volitaire’s Use of Pangloss Optimism is a philosophy which supports the idealism that everything happens out of absolute necessity, everything happens for the best, and that we are living in the “best of all possible worlds.” In a short novel titled “Candide, or Optimism” published by Voltaire in 1759, Voltaire makes a excellent case against Optimism as a philosophical position by using a character by the name of Pangloss to portray an exaggerated view of Optimism. By the reader seeing how ridiculous these scenarios are and how obvious the problems with this philosophy are, it supports his view that this idealism is false and flawed. Pangloss’s philosophy parodies the ideas of the Enlightenment thinker G. W. Von Leibniz. He believed that
