Either
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Either is an English pronoun, adjective, and conjunction, meaning one, or the other, of two. Its origin is from Old English ǽghweþer, which literally analyses as a compound word "any - whether."
Either/or means "one, or the other, but not both". Its negative is neither/nor, meaning "none of them".
In philosophy, the first book Søren Kierkegaard published under a pseudonym was titled Either/Or (Danish: Enten/Eller). Written under the name Victor Eremita (Latin: the Victorious Hermit), the book contains his reflections on aesthetics and ethics, and argued against the Hegelian dialectics of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis; Kierkegaard concludes that neither aesthetics nor ethics offer a way out of the human race's existential despair, and concludes that only a leap of faith can solve that problem, arguing that making such a leap cannot have, and does not need, a rational justification*.
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