172 résultats pour "philosophy"

• Comte, Isidore-Auguste-Marie-François-Xavier

  1 Life Auguste Comte was born in Montpellier, France. He attended the École Polytechnique, from which he was expelled in 1816, for political reasons. Comte's main concern throughout his life was resolving the political, social and moral problems caused by the French Revolution. To that end, he embarked upon an encyclopedic work, which he first conceived under the inspiration of Henri de Saint-Simon , for whom he worked as secretary from 1817 to 1824. At that time, he proposed several pla...

• Asmus, Valentin Ferdinandovich

  Schelling, Fichte and Hegel. He argues that it was Kant who first grasped the significance of dialecticalcontradiction, though he mistakenly confined its influence to the realm of thought. Hegel, in contrast, correctlydiscerned that the development of being itself is dialectical, but his account is belied by his idealist metaphysics andteleological conception of history. It was Marx and Engels, Asmus argues, who identified the true empirical contentof Hegel's system and turned dialecti...

• Bosanquet, Bernard

  individuality is judged not by the atomic and exclusive self, nor by what persons are, but by what they can become, and that is shown in their society and its cultural achievements. Bosanquet's approach shows to advantage in his political philosophy. It arms him against the atomic individualism he finds in the ‘theories of the first look' of Bentham, Spencer andJ.S. Mill. Instead, combining Rousseau andHegel, Bosanquet argues that the individual members of a state are linked together by t...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: AQUINAS' PHILOSOPHY OF MIND

• Cohen, Hermann

  foundation of being in thought: thought as the origin of being. Reflecting the constantly progressing sciences withtheir shifting paradigms, the system of categories and judgments represented in Cohen's logic is open-ended - quitea contrast to Kant's efforts to find fixed normative patterns in our thinking as earnest of its objectivity. There areother deviations: most strikingly, Kant's ‘thing-in-itself' (noumena) (see Kant, I. §3) is eliminated as a superfluousdogmatic prejudice. In another not...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Leibniz

  substances, with the properties only of mind.Like Malebranche's substances, Leibniz's monads cannot be causally affected by any other creatures. ‘Monads haveno windows, by which anything could come in or go out.' Because they have no parts, they cannot grow or decay:they can begin only by creation, and end only by annihilation. They can, however, change; indeed they changeconstantly; but they change from within. Since they have no physical properties to alter, their changes must bechanges of men...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: MACHIAVELLI

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Sidgwick

  went on amongst the clever young men in the society known as ‘the Apostles', which he joined in his second year. Sidgwick described his joining the Apostles as having ‘more effect on my intellectual life than any one thing thathappened to me afterwards'. He described the spirit of the group as that of ‘the pursuit of truth with absolute devotion and unreserve by a group of intimate friends' ([5.30], 134). THE RELIGIOUS BACKGROUND Victorian England has been faulted for many things, but mor...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: AVERROES

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: HERACLITUS

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ROUSSEAU

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: SCEPTICISM

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: EpicuREANisM ?

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Absolute

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Schopenhauer

  There are many different grades of will, and only the higher grades are accompanied by knowledge and self-determination.If, therefore, I say, the force which attracts a stone to the earth is according to its nature, in itself and apart fromall idea, will, I shall not be supposed to express in this opinion the insane opinion that the stone moves itself inaccordance with a known motive, merely because this is the way in which will appears in man.Will is the force which lives in the plant,...

• Broad, Charlie Dunbar

  pseudo-problems, and recommended close attention to our ordinary language as appropriate therapy. But for Broad, 'in philosophy it is equally silly to be a slave to common speech or to neglect it'. And he always insisted that there is a proper place not just for Critical Philosophy - 'the analysis and definition of our fundamental concepts, and the clear statement and resolute criticism of our fundamental beliefs' - but also for Speculative Philosophy which hopes 'to reach some general...

• BERTRAND RUSSELL: OEUVRES ET PHOTOGRAPHIE

  BERTRAND RUSSELL ŒUVRES PRINCIPALES : AN ESSAY ON THE FOUNDATIONS OF GEOMETRY (1897) ESSAI SUR LES FONDEMENTS DE LA GtOMÉTRIE (1901) A CRITICAL EXPOSITION OF THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEIBNIZ (19oo) LA PHILOSOPHIE DE LEIBNIZ (1go8) THE PRINCIPLES OF MATHEMATICS (1903) PRINCIPIA MATHEMATICA (AVEC A.N. WHITEHEAD) (1910-1913) THE PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY (1912) LES PROBLtMES DE LA PHILOSOPHIE (1923) OUR KNOWLEDGE OF THE EXTERNAL WORLD (1914...

• Brunschvicg, Léon

  this, Brunschvicg devotes a long chapter to the development of modern logical theory - to Boole, Peano, Frege and, above all, Russell. The final chapters are devoted to drawing the moral of this long historical inquiry. Brunschvicg here clarifies his own point of view, and presents a qualified form of 'intellectualism' in his final chapter on 'The reaction against "mathematism": the sense of intellectualism in mathematics' . Up to now, he claims, the philosophy of mathematics has lacked a...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: NEO-PLATONISM

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Philosophes

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Thomas Aquinas

  them being there).11 But God is also the final cause of creatures, that to which they aim, tend, or return (reditus),that which contains the perfection or goal of all created things.12 According to Aquinas, everything comes from Godand is geared to him. God accounts for there being anything apart from himself, and he is what is aimed at byanything moving towards its perfection. Aristotle says that everything aims for its good (Ethics I, i, 1094a3).Aquinas says that any created good derives...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: RENAISSANCE PLATONISM

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Saint Bonaventure

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Charles Darwin

  cousins, descended from a common ancestor.The case for Darwin's theory was enormously strengthened in the twentieth century with the discovery of themechanisms of heredity and the development of molecular genetics. It would not be to my purpose, and would bebeyond my competence, to evaluate the scientific evidence for Darwinism. But it is necessary to spend some timeon the philosophical implications of his theory, assuming that it is well established.From Darwin's time until the present, ev...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: SAINT ANSELM

  Anselme de Cantorbéry, ce théologien novateur qui a voulu prouver Dieu pour mieux croire en lui.Né à Aoste — en Piémont — Anselme (1033-1109) entre à l'abbaye des Bénédictins du Bec — dans l'Eure —, dont ildevient abbé en 1078, avant de devenir archevêque de Cantorbéry en 1093. L'essentiel de sa production littérairese situe entre 1070 et 1109, production considérable où Anselme s'inspire de la tradition augustinienne.C'est dans le Proslogion (1077), terme signifiant Exposé ou Allocution, que sa...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Abstract objects

  to be an abstract object; but while it is not located anywhere, it has not always existed, but was devised at acertain time. Other examples are natural languages, many if not all works of art, and words and letters in the type-as opposed to token-sense (roughly, the sense in which there are just six, not eight, distinct letters in the word'abstract') (see Type/token distinction ). Thus while the abstract-concrete distinction undoubtedly has much to do with spatiality and temporality, it does no...

• al-Suhrawardi, Shihab al-Din Yahya

  astronomy. The major portion of al-Suhrawardi's writings is devoted to this last stage of rational analysis andsystematization, although he sometimes relates his visions. His symbolic narratives in Persian are in some sense arecord of these, although in them al-Suhrawardi, the author, is never explicitly the first person. The narratives havea pedagogic function, and are guides to the kind of experiences to be encountered by the seeker and to theirinterpretation; indeed a central figur...

• Charleton, Walter

  only in his proof of God where he gives (with full acknowledgement) the causal argument offered by Descartes in the third Meditation, but also in a sharp dualism between mind and matter. The soul is a substance perfectly distinct from that of body, he claims, and it is endowed with immortality by the character of its essence. He follows Descartes, too, in holding that the idea of God is innate. In drawing on Descartes ' philosophy Charleton makes it clear that he wishes to distance himself from...

• Beck, Jacob Sigismund

  determinations. Concepts are the results of this operation, which Beck calls ‘original representing' . Beck's ‘Standpoint' consequently ‘reverses' the method of the first Critique . WhereasKant had led the reader gradually to the highest point of transcendental philosophy, or the synthetic unity of consciousness,Beck commences with it: with the postulate to represent originally. He then argues that the categories are but different modes of this original activity. Space emerges in original...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: ABELARD'S LOGIC

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Oxford Calculators

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: AQUINAS' NATURAL THEOLOGY

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Jesus of Nazareth

• Cicero, Marcus Tullius

  Cicero's extant works, although only part of his enormous output, comprise over fifty speeches, nearly a thousand letters to friends and associates, several works on rhetorical theory and practice, and twelve on philosophical topics. This vast corpus, besides displaying great intellectual range and stylistic virtuosity, embodies Cicero's conviction that philosophy and rhetoric are interdependent and both essential for the improvement of human life and society. His oratory bears the stamp of...

• English Literature I INTRODUCTION English Literature, literature produced in England, from the introduction of Old English by the Anglo-Saxons in the 5th century to the present.

  evident. That feature is typical of other Old English literature, for almost all of what survives was preserved by monastic copyists. Most of it was actually composed byreligious writers after the early conversion of the people from their faith in the older Germanic divinities. Sacred legend and story were reduced to verse in poems resembling Beowulf in form. At first such verse was rendered in the somewhat simple, stark style of the poems of Caedmon, a humble man of the late 7th century who w...

• Applied ethics

  rule, while benefiting from the fact that everyone else is following it (see Universalism in ethics ). The applied ethicist, like the theoretical moral philosopher, must find a way to deal with this problem, but for the appliedethicist, the problem is bound up with the need to employ what is sometimes called moral casuistry. This ancientscience is not necessarily to be despised, for while a secondary meaning of the term ‘casuist' is indeed ‘sophist' or‘quibbler', it was not or...

• Condillac, Etienne Bonnot de

  concerning Human Understanding (1689) by Pierre Coste and read Voltaire's books on Newton. He was the contemporary of such Enlightenment luminaries as Helvetius, Diderot, Buffon, La Mettrie and Holbach. Voltaire and Diderot both expressed the very highest regard for his writings. Condillac was on friendly terms with Rousseau, and was frequently to be seen at the salons in and around Paris where so much of the intellectual activity of the Enlightenment took place. He spent nine years (1758-67...

• Cavell, Stanley

  that agreement is ineliminable. Since, however, our capacity to use words presupposes some such agreement, its sceptical refusal must result in emptiness - in the sceptics' saying something other than they take themselves to mean, or in saying nothing whatever. Accordingly, scepticism must be combatted not by claiming that the repudiation of criteria is impossible or irrational, but by demonstrating its true cost. That cost turns out to be high. In so far as criteria distinguish phenomena fro...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Alemanno, Yohanan ben Isaac

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: THE LIFE OF AUGUSTINE

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din

• Conceptual analysis

  Kant's important idea that conceptual truths can be either analytic a priori or synthetic a priori is effectively erased by Gottlob Frege in his Foundations of Arithmetic (1884). Frege's overriding philosophical aim is to put mathematical proof on a firm footing by reducing the truths of arithmetic to analytic truths of logic. In view of this, the proper goal of an analysis is the production of non-circular, explanatory, yet meaning-preserving general definitions of fundamental concepts -...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: al-Dawani, Jalal al-Din

• Italian Literature I INTRODUCTION Italian Literature, literature written in the Italian language from about the 13th century to the present.

  Dante’s Inferno and PurgatoryThis illustration comes from a late Gothic edition of The Divine Comedy by the great Italian poet Dante Alighieri. Lucifer,the devil, is at the center of Earth, and the mouth of hell, the inferno, opens below him. At the opposite pole is a mountainleading to purgatory. The manuscript is in the National Library in Florence, Italy.Scala/Art Resource, NY Dante is one of the great figures of world literature. He is remarkable for the loftiness of his thought, the vividne...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Adorno, Theodor Wiesengrund

  respect to the theory of rationality, anxieties about these sources of error led to the view that reason must be fullyautonomous, and not determined by anything external to it. It is this thought that underlies the primacy of method.In the theory of language, the same project is pursued in the attempt to eliminate opacity, indeterminacy andvagueness from the meaning of concepts; this is the project of positivism and the analytic tradition generally.Dialectic of Enlightenment aims to...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Albert the Great

  Aristotle seems more Neoplatonic than Aristotelian, it is precisely because it is based as much on the philosophies ofArabic commentators on Aristotle (Alfarabi, Avicenna, the Liber de causis and Averroes) as it is on the philosophy of Aristotle himself. As the principal engineer of the introduction of philosophy to the Latins, Albert tried to portray ashomogeneous a philosophy that is not and cannot be homogeneous in the eyes of the philologist. It is, however,this Arabic-Latin version of Ari...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Ajdukiewicz, Kazimierz

  non-translatable. The acceptance or rejection of sentences is always related to a definite language L. If L is closed and connected, empirical situations do not force us either to accept or reject any sentence, because we canalways change our conceptual apparatus. This is an essential strengthening of usual conventionalism. For Poincaré and Duhem , we are free to change our theoretical principles, because they are hidden conventions. For Ajdukiewicz, experiential reports are also closely...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Reformation

  after an inconclusive war against the Protestant princes, had accepted the partition of Germany between Lutheransand Catholics at the peace of Augsburg (1555). England had lurched from schismatic Catholi¬cism under Henry VIII,to Calvinism under his son Edward VI, to counter¬reformation Catholicism under his elder daughter Mary and herhusband Philip II of Spain, and finally to an Anglican compromise under his younger daughter Elizabeth I.The work of the Counter-Reformation reached its apogee unde...

• Encyclopedia of Philosophy: The Doubt and the Cogito - DESCARTES

• Indian Literature I INTRODUCTION Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things Indian author Arundhati Roy poses with a copy of her acclaimed first novel, The God of Small Things (1997).

  Mathura BuddhaMany of the earliest texts of Indian literature were religious writings of Buddhism. This Buddha figure carved out ofsandstone is from Mathura, a city in northern India that was at the center of Buddhist sculptural activity from the 2ndcentury bc to the 6th century ad.Angelo Hornak/Corbis The sacred Vedas were composed in Old Sanskrit by Aryan poet-seers between about 1500 BC and about 1000 BC. The Vedas are compilations of two major literary forms: hymns of praise to nature deit...