Philosophy is the study of general and fundamental problems, such as those connected with existence, knowledge, values, reason, mind, and language. It is distinguished from other ways of addressing such problems by its critical, generally systematic approach and its reliance on rational argument. The word "philosophy" comes from the Greek φιλοσοφία (''philosophia''), which literally means "love of wisdom".

Branches of philosophy

The following branches are the main areas of study:

Metaphysics is the study of the nature of reality, including the relationship between mind and body, substance and accident, events and causation. Traditional branches are cosmology and ontology.

Epistemology is concerned with the nature and scope of knowledge, and whether knowledge is possible. Among its central concerns has been the challenge posed by skepticism and the relationships between truth, belief, and justification.

Ethics, or "moral philosophy", is concerned primarily with the question of the best way to live, and secondarily, concerning the question of whether this question can be answered. The main branches of ethics are meta-ethics, normative ethics, and applied ethics. Meta-ethics concerns the nature of ethical thought, such as the origins of the words good and bad, and origins of other comparative words of various ethical systems, whether there are absolute ethical truths, and how such truths could be known. Normative ethics are more concerned with the questions of how one ought to act, and what the right course of action is. This is where most ethical theories are generated. Lastly, applied ethics go beyond theory and step into real world ethical practice, such as questions of whether or not abortion is correct. Ethics is also associated with the idea of morality, and the two are often interchangeable.

Political philosophy is the study of government and the relationship of individuals (or families and clans) to communities including the state. It includes questions about justice, law, property, and the rights and obligations of the citizen. Politics and ethics are traditionally inter-linked subjects, as both discuss the question of what is good and how people should live.

Aesthetics deals with beauty, art, enjoyment, sensory-emotional values, perception, and matters of taste and sentiment.

Logic is the study of valid argument forms. Beginning in the late 19th century, mathematicians such as Gottlob Frege focused on a mathematical treatment of logic, and today the subject of logic has two broad divisions: mathematical logic (formal symbolic logic) and what is now called philosophical logic.

Philosophy has expanded to include specialized branches of thought:

Philosophy of language explores the nature, the origins, and the use of language.

Philosophy of law (more commonly called Jurisprudence) explores the varying theories explaining the nature and the interpretations of the law in society.

Philosophy of mind explores the nature of the mind, and its relationship to the body, and is typified by disputes between dualism and materialism. In recent years there has been increasing similarity between this branch of philosophy and cognitive science.

Philosophy of religion

Philosophy of science

Many academic disciplines also have philosophical foundations. These include history, logic, law, and mathematics. In addition, a range of disciplines have emerged to address areas that historically were the subjects of philosophy. These include anthropology,psychology, and physics.

History

Many societies have considered philosophical questions and built philosophical traditions based upon each other's works.

Eastern philosophy is organized by the chronological periods of each region. Historians of western philosophy usually divide the subject into three or more periods, the most important being ancient philosophy, medieval philosophy, and modern philosophy.

Ancient philosophy

Babylonian

The origins of Babylonian philosophy can be traced back to the wisdom of early Mesopotamia, which embodied certain philosophies of life, particularly ethics, in the forms of dialectic, dialogues, epic poetry, folklore, hymns, lyrics, prose, and proverbs. The reasoning and rationality of the Babylonians developed beyond empirical observation. The Babylonian text ''Dialog of Pessimism'' contains similarities to the agnostic thought of the sophists, the Heraclitean doctrine of contrasts, and the dialogues of Plato, as well as a precursor to the maieutic Socratic method of Socrates and Plato. The Milesian philosopher Thales is also traditionally said to have studied philosophy in Mesopotamia.

Ancient Chinese

Philosophy has had a tremendous effect on Chinese civilization, and East Asia as a whole. Many of the great philosophical schools were formulated during the Spring and Autumn Period and Warring States Period, and came to be known as the Hundred Schools of Thought, which consisted of Confucianism, Taoism, Mohism, Legalism, Agrarianism, School of Naturalists, and the Logicians. Similarly to Western philosophy, Chinese philosophy also covers a broad and complex range of thought, possessing a multitude of schools that address every branch and subject area of philosophy.

Ancient Graeco-Roman

Ancient Graeco-Roman philosophy is a period of Western philosophy, starting in the 6th century [c. 585] BC to the 6th century AD. It is usually divided into three periods: the pre-Socratic period, the period of Plato and Aristotle, and the post-Aristotelian (or Hellenistic) period. A fourth period that is sometimes added includes the Neoplatonic and Christian philosophers of Late Antiquity. The most important of the ancient philosophers (in terms of subsequent influence) are Plato and Aristotle.

The main subjects of ancient philosophy are: understanding the fundamental causes and principles of the universe; explaining it in an economical way; the epistemological problem of reconciling the diversity and change of the natural universe, with the possibility of obtaining fixed and certain knowledge about it; questions about things that cannot be perceived by the senses, such as numbers, elements, universals, and gods. Socrates is said to have been the initiator of more focused study upon the human things including the analysis of patterns of reasoning and argument and the nature of the good life and the importance of understanding and knowledge in order to pursue it; the explication of the concept of justice, and its relation to various political systems.

In this period the crucial features of the philosophical method were established: a critical approach to received or established views, and the appeal to reason and argumentation.

Ancient Indian

The term Indian philosophy (Sanskrit: ''Darshanas''), may refer to any of several traditions of philosophical thought that originated in the Indian subcontinent, including Hindu philosophy, Buddhist philosophy, and Jain philosophy. Having the same or rather intertwined origins, all of these philosophies have a common underlying theme of Dharma, and similarly attempt to explain the attainment of emancipation. They have been formalized and promulgated chiefly between 1000 BC to a few centuries AD, with residual commentaries and reformations continuing up to as late as the 20th century by Aurobindo and ISKCON among others, who provided stylized interpretations.

In the history of the Indian subcontinent, following the establishment of a Vedic culture, the development of philosophical and religious thought over a period of two millennia gave rise to what came to be called the six schools of ''astika'', or orthodox, Indian or Hindu philosophy. These schools have come to be synonymous with the greater religion of Hinduism, which was a development of the early Vedic religion.

Hindu philosophy constitutes an integral part of the culture of South Asia, and is the first of the Dharmic philosophies that were influential throughout the Far East. The great diversity in thought and practice of Hinduism is nurtured by its liberal universalism

Ancient Persian

Persian philosophy can be traced back as far as Old Iranian philosophical traditions and thoughts, with their ancient Indo-Iranian roots. These were considerably influenced by Zarathustra's teachings. Throughout Iranian history and due to remarkable political and social influences such as the Macedonian, the Arab, and the Mongol invasions of Persia, a wide spectrum of schools of thought arose. These espoused a variety of views on philosophical questions, extending from Old Iranian and mainly Zoroastrianism-influenced traditions to schools appearing in the late pre-Islamic era, such as Manicheism and Mazdakism, as well as various post-Islamic schools. Iranian philosophy after Arab invasion of Persia is characterized by different interactions with the Old Iranian philosophy, the Greek philosophy and with the development of Islamic philosophy. The Illumination school and the Transcendent theosophy are regarded as two of the main philosophical traditions of that era in Persia. Zoroastrianism has been identified as one of the key early events in the development of philosophy.

5th - 16th centuries

Europe

Medieval

Medieval philosophy is the philosophy of Western Europe and the Middle East during the Middle Ages, roughly extending from the Christianization of the Roman Empire until the Renaissance. Medieval philosophy is defined partly by the rediscovery and further development of classical Greek and Hellenistic philosophy, and partly by the need to address theological problems and to integrate the then widespread sacred doctrines of Abrahamic religion (Islam, Judaism, and Christianity) with secular learning.

The history of western European medieval philosophy is traditionally divided into two main periods: the period in the Latin West following the Early Middle Ages until the 12th century, when the works of Aristotle and Plato were preserved and cultivated; and the "golden age" of the 12th, 13th and 14th centuries in the Latin West, which witnessed the culmination of the recovery of ancient philosophy, and significant developments in the field of philosophy of religion, logic and metaphysics.

The medieval era was disparagingly treated by the Renaissance humanists, who saw it as a barbaric "middle" period between the classical age of Greek and Roman culture, and the "rebirth" or ''renaissance'' of classical culture. Yet this period of nearly a thousand years was the longest period of philosophical development in Europe, and possibly the richest. Jorge Gracia has argued that "in intensity, sophistication, and achievement, the philosophical flowering in the thirteenth century could be rightly said to rival the golden age of Greek philosophy in the fourth century B.C."

Some problems discussed throughout this period are the relation of faith to reason, the existence and unity of God, the object of theology and metaphysics, the problems of knowledge, of universals, and of individuation.

Philosophers from the Middle Ages include the Christian philosophers Augustine of Hippo, Boethius, Anselm, Gilbert of Poitiers, Peter Abelard, Roger Bacon, Bonaventure, Thomas Aquinas, Duns Scotus, William of Ockham and Jean Buridan; the Jewish philosophers Maimonides and Gersonides; and the Muslim philosophers Alkindus, Alfarabi, Alhazen, Avicenna, Algazel, Avempace, Abubacer and Averroes. The medieval tradition of Scholasticism continued to flourish as late as the 17th century, in figures such as Francisco Suarez and John of St. Thomas.

Aquinas, father of Thomism, was immensely influential in Catholic Europe, placed a great emphasis on reason and argumentation, and was one of the first to use the new translation of Aristotle's metaphysical and epistemological writing. His work was a significant departure from the Neoplatonic and Augustinian thinking that had dominated much of early Scholasticism.

Renaissance

The Renaissance ("rebirth") was a period of transition between the Middle Ages and modern thought, in which the recovery of classical texts helped shift philosophical interests away from technical studies in logic, metaphysics, and theology towards eclectic inquiries into morality, philology, and mysticism. The study of the classics and the humane arts generally, such as history and literature, enjoyed a scholarly interest hitherto unknown in Christendom, a tendency referred to as humanism. Displacing the medieval interest in metaphysics and logic, the humanists followed Petrarch in making man and his virtues the focus of philosophy.

The study of classical philosophy also developed in two new ways. On the one hand, the study of Aristotle was changed through the influence of Averroism. The disagreements between these Averroist Aristotelians, and more orthodox catholic Aristotelians such as Albertus Magnus and Thomas Aquinas eventually contributed to the development of a "humanist Aristotelianism" developed in the Renaissance, as exemplified in the thought of Pietro Pomponazzi and Giacomo Zabarella. Secondly, as an alternative to Aristotle, the study of Plato and the Neoplatonists became common. This was assisted by the rediscovery of works which had not been well known previously in Western Europe. Notable Renaissance Platonists include Nicholas of Cusa, and later Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola.

The Renaissance also renewed interest in anti-Aristotelian theories of nature considered as an organic, living whole comprehensible independently of theology, as in the work of Nicholas of Cusa, Nicholas Copernicus, Giordano Bruno, Telesius, and Tommaso Campanella. Such movements in natural philosophy dovetailed with a revival of interest in occultism, magic, hermeticism, and astrology, which were thought to yield hidden ways of knowing and mastering nature (e.g., in Marsilio Ficino and Giovanni Pico della Mirandola).

These new movements in philosophy developed contemporaneously with larger religious and political transformations in Europe: the Reformation and the decline of feudalism. Though the theologians of the Protestant Reformation showed little direct interest in philosophy, their destruction of the traditional foundations of theological and intellectual authority harmonized with a revival of fideism and skepticism in thinkers such as Erasmus, Montaigne, and Francisco Sanches. Meanwhile, the gradual centralization of political power in nation-states was echoed by the emergence of secular political philosophies, as in the works of Niccolò Machiavelli (often described as the first modern political thinker, or a key turning point towards modern political thinking), Thomas More, Erasmus, Justus Lipsius, Jean Bodin, and Hugo Grotius.

East Asia

Mid-Imperial China

Mid-Imperial Chinese philosophy is primarily defined by the development of Neo-confucianism. During the Tang Dynasty, Buddhism from Nepal also became a prominent philosophical and religious discipline. (It should be noted that philosophy and religion were clearly distinguished in the West, whilst these concepts were more continuous in the East due to, for example, the philosophical concepts of Buddhism.)

Japanese

Korean

Middle East

Islamic

17th-21st centuries

Europe

Early modern philosophy

Chronologically, the early modern era of western philosophy is usually identified with the 17th and 18th centuries, with the 18th century often being referred to as the Enlightenment. Modern philosophy is distinguished from its predecessors by its increasing independence from traditional authorities such as the Church, academia, and Aristotelianism; a new focus on the foundations of knowledge and metaphysical system-building; and the emergence of modern physics out of natural philosophy. Other central topics of philosophy in this period include the nature of the mind and its relation to the body, the implications of the new natural sciences for traditional theological topics such as free will and God, and the emergence of a secular basis for moral and political philosophy. These trends first distinctively coalesce in Francis Bacon's call for a new, empirical program for expanding knowledge, and soon found massively influential form in the mechanical physics and rationalist metaphysics of Rene Descartes. Thomas Hobbes was the first to apply this methodology systematically to political philosophy and is the originator of modern political philosophy, including the modern theory of a "social contract". The academic canon of early modern philosophy generally includes Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant, though influential contributions to philosophy were made by many thinkers in this period, such as Galileo Galilei, Pierre Gassendi, Blaise Pascal, Nicolas Malebranche, Isaac Newton, Christian Wolff, Montesquieu, Pierre Bayle, Thomas Reid, Jean d'Alembert, and Adam Smith. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was a seminal figure in initiating reaction against the Enlightenment. The approximate end of the early modern period is most often identified with Immanuel Kant's systematic attempt to limit metaphysics, justify scientific knowledge, and reconcile both of these with morality and freedom.

19th-century philosophy

Later modern philosophy is usually considered to begin after the philosophy of Immanuel Kant at the beginning of the 19th century. German philosophy exercised broad influence in this century, owing in part to the dominance of the German university system. German idealists, such as Johann Gottlieb Fichte, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, and Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling, transformed the work of Kant by maintaining that the world is constituted by a rational or mind-like process, and as such is entirely knowable. Arthur Schopenhauer's identification of this world-constituting process as an irrational will to live influenced later 19th- and early 20th-century thinking, such as the work of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.

After Hegel's death in 1831, 19th-century philosophy largely turned against idealism in favor of varieties of philosophical naturalism, such as the positivism of Auguste Comte, the empiricism of John Stuart Mill, and the materialism of Karl Marx. Logic began a period of its most significant advances since the inception of the discipline, as increasing mathematical precision opened entire fields of inference to formalization in the work of George Boole and Gottlob Frege. Other philosophers who initiated lines of thought that would continue to shape philosophy into the 20th century include

Gottlob Frege and Henry Sidgwick, whose work in logic and ethics, respectively, provided the tools for early analytic philosophy.

Charles Sanders Peirce and William James, who founded pragmatism.

Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche, who laid the groundwork for existentialism and post-structuralism.

20th-century philosophy

Within the last century, philosophy has increasingly become a professional discipline practiced within universities, like other academic disciplines. Accordingly, it has become less general and more specialized. In the view of one prominent recent historian: "Philosophy has become a highly organized discipline, done by specialists primarily for other specialists. The number of philosophers has exploded, the volume of publication has swelled, and the subfields of serious philosophical investigation have multiplied. Not only is the broad field of philosophy today far too vast to be embraced by one mind, something similar is true even of many highly specialized subfields."

In the English-speaking world, analytic philosophy became the dominant school for much of the 20th century. In the first half of the century, it was a cohesive school, shaped strongly by logical positivism, united by the notion that philosophical problems could and should be solved by attention to logic and language. The pioneering work of Bertrand Russell was a model for the early development of analytic philosophy, moving from a rejection of the idealism dominant in late 19th century British philosophy to an neo-Humean empiricism, strengthened by the conceptual resources of modern mathematical logic. In the latter half of the 20th century, analytic philosophy diffused into a wide variety of disparate philosophical views, only loosely united by historical lines of influence and a self-identified commitment to clarity and rigor. The post-war transformation of the analytic program led in two broad directions: on one hand, an interest in ordinary language as a way of avoiding or redescribing traditional philosophical problems, and on the other, a more thoroughgoing naturalism that sought to dissolve the puzzles of modern philosophy via the results of the natural sciences (such as cognitive psychology and evolutionary biology). The shift in the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, from a view congruent with logical positivism to a therapeutic dissolution of traditional philosophy as a linguistic misunderstanding of normal forms of life, was the most influential version of the first direction in analytic philosophy. The later work of Russell and the philosophy of W.V.O. Quine are influential exemplars of the naturalist approach dominant in the second half of the 20th century. But the diversity of analytic philosophy from the 1970s onward defies easy generalization: the naturalism of Quine and his epigoni was in some precincts superseded by a "new metaphysics" of possible worlds, as in the influential work of David Lewis. Recently, the experimental philosophy movement has sought to reappraise philosophical problems through social science research techniques.

On continental Europe, no single school or temperament enjoyed dominance. The flight of the logical positivists from central Europe during the 1930s and 1940s, however, diminished philosophical interest in natural science, and an emphasis on the humanities, broadly construed, figures prominently in what is usually called "continental philosophy". 20th century movements such as phenomenology, existentialism, modern hermeneutics, critical theory, structuralism, and poststructuralism are included within this loose category. The founder of phenomenology, Edmund Husserl, sought to study consciousness as experienced from a first-person perspective, while Martin Heidegger drew on the ideas of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche, and Husserl to propose an unconventional existential approach to ontology.

Etymology

The introduction of the terms "philosopher" and "philosophy" has been ascribed to the Greek thinker Pythagoras. The ascription is said to be based on a passage in a lost work of Herakleides Pontikos, a disciple of Aristotle. It is considered to be part of the widespread body of legends of Pythagoras of this time. "Philosopher" was understood as a word which contrasted with "sophist" (from ''sophoi''). Traveling sophists or "wise men" were important in Classical Greece, often earning money as teachers, whereas philosophers are "lovers of wisdom" and not professionals.

Main theories

Realism and nominalism

''Realism'' sometimes means the position opposed to the 18th-century idealism, namely that some things have real existence outside the mind. Its standard meaning is the doctrine that abstract entities corresponding to universal terms like "man" or "table" or "red" actually exist (e.g. for Plato in a separate realm of ideas). It is opposed to nominalism, the view that abstract or universal terms are words only, or denote mental states such as ideas, beliefs, or intentions. The latter position, developed by Peter Abelard and famously held by William of Ockham, is called conceptualism.

Rationalism and empiricism

''Rationalism'' is any view emphasizing the role or importance of human reason. Extreme rationalism tries to base all knowledge on reason alone. Rationalism typically starts from premises that cannot coherently be denied, then attempts by logical steps to deduce every possible object of knowledge.

The first rationalist, in this broad sense, is often held to be Parmenides (fl. 500 BC), who argued that it is impossible to doubt that thinking actually occurs. But thinking must have an object, therefore something ''beyond'' thinking really exists. Parmenides deduced that what really exists must have certain properties—for example, that it cannot come into existence or cease to exist, that it is a coherent whole, that it remains the same eternally (in fact, exists altogether outside time). This is known as the third man argument. Zeno of Elea (born c. 495 BC) was a disciple of Parmenides, and argued that motion is impossible, since the assertion that it exists implies a contradiction (see Zeno's arrow).

Plato (427–347 BC) was also influenced by Parmenides, but combined rationalism with a form of realism. The philosopher's work is to consider being, and the essence (ousia) of things. But the characteristic of essences is that they are universal. The nature of a man, a triangle, a tree, applies to all men, all triangles, all trees. Plato argued that these essences are mind-independent "forms", that humans (but particularly philosophers) can come to know by reason, and by ignoring the distractions of sense-perception.

Modern rationalism begins with Descartes. Reflection on the nature of perceptual experience, as well as scientific discoveries in physiology and optics, led Descartes (and also Locke) to the view that we are directly aware of ideas, rather than objects. This view gave rise to three questions:

# Is an idea a true copy of the real thing that it represents? Sensation is not a direct interaction between bodily objects and our sense, but is a physiological process involving representation (for example, an image on the retina). Locke thought that a "secondary quality" such as a sensation of green could in no way resemble the arrangement of particles in matter that go to produce this sensation, although he thought that "primary qualities" such as shape, size, number, were really in objects. # How can physical objects such as chairs and tables, or even physiological processes in the brain, give rise to mental items such as ideas? This is part of what became known as the mind-body problem. # If all the contents of awareness are ideas, how can we know that anything exists apart from ideas?

Descartes tried to address the last problem by reason. He began, echoing Parmenides, with a principle that he thought could not coherently be denied: I ''think'', therefore I ''am'' (often given in his original Latin: ''Cogito ergo sum''). From this principle, Descartes went on to construct a complete system of knowledge (which involves proving the existence of God, using, among other means, a version of the ontological argument). His view that reason alone could yield substantial truths about reality strongly influenced those philosophers usually considered modern rationalists (such as Baruch Spinoza, Gottfried Leibniz, and Christian Wolff), while provoking criticism from other philosophers who have retrospectively come to be grouped together as empiricists.

Empiricism, in contrast to rationalism, downplays or dismisses the ability of reason alone to yield knowledge of the world, preferring to base any knowledge we have on our senses. This dates back to the concept of ''tabula rasa'' (unscribed tablet) implicit in Aristotle's ''On the Soul'', described more explicitly in Avicenna's ''The Book of Healing'', and demonstrated in Ibn Tufail's ''Hayy ibn Yaqdhan'' as a thought experiment. Modern empiricism was notably expounded by Francis Bacon, John Locke in ''An Essay Concerning Human Understanding'' in 1689, and David Hume.

During this era, religious ideas played a mixed role in the struggles that preoccupied secular philosophy. Bishop Berkeley's famous idealist refutation of key tenets of Isaac Newton is a case of an Enlightenment philosopher who drew substantially from religious ideas. Other influential religious thinkers of the time include Blaise Pascal, Joseph Butler, Thomas Reid, and Jonathan Edwards. Other major writers, such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Edmund Burke, took a rather different path.

Skepticism

''Skepticism'' is a philosophical attitude that, in its most extreme form, questions the possibility of obtaining ''any'' sort of knowledge. It was first articulated by Pyrrho, who believed that everything could be doubted except ''appearances''. Sextus Empiricus (2nd century AD), skepticism's most prominent advocate, describes it as an

"ability to place in antithesis, in any manner whatever, appearances and judgments, and thus ... to come first of all to a suspension of judgment and then to mental tranquility."

Skepticism so conceived is not merely the use of doubt, but is the use of doubt for a particular end: a calmness of the soul, or ''ataraxia''. Skepticism poses itself as a challenge to dogmatism, whose adherents think they have found the truth.

Sextus noted that the reliability of perception may always be questioned, because it is idiosyncratic to the perceiver. The appearance of individual things changes depending on whether they are in a group: for example, the shavings of a goat's horn are white when taken alone, yet the intact horn is black. A pencil, when viewed lengthwise, looks like a stick; but when examined at the tip, it looks merely like a circle.

Skepticism was revived in the early modern period by Michel de Montaigne and Blaise Pascal. Its most extreme exponent, however, was David Hume. Hume argued that there are only two kinds of reasoning: what he called ''probable'' and ''demonstrative'' (cf. Hume's fork). Neither of these two forms of reasoning can lead us to a reasonable belief in the continued existence of an external world. Demonstrative reasoning cannot do this, because demonstration (that is, deductive reasoning from well-founded premises) alone cannot establish the uniformity of nature (as captured by scientific laws and principles, for example). Such reason alone cannot establish that the future will resemble the past. We have certain beliefs about the world (that the sun will rise tomorrow, for example), but these beliefs are the product of habit and custom, and do not depend on any sort of logical inferences from what is already given ''certain''. But ''probable'' reasoning (inductive reasoning), which aims to take us from the observed to the unobserved, cannot do this either: it ''also'' depends on the uniformity of nature, and this supposed uniformity cannot be proved, without circularity, by any appeal to uniformity. The best that either sort of reasoning can accomplish is conditional truth: ''if'' certain assumptions are true, ''then'' certain conclusions follow. So nothing about the world can be established with certainty. Hume concludes that there is no solution to the skeptical argument—except, in effect, to ignore it.

Even if these matters were resolved in every case, we would have in turn to justify our standard of justification, leading to an infinite regress (hence the term ''regress skepticism'').

Many philosophers have questioned the value of such skeptical arguments. The question of whether we can achieve knowledge of the external world is based on how high a standard we set for the justification of such knowledge. If our standard is absolute certainty, then we cannot progress beyond the existence of mental sensations. We cannot even deduce the existence of a coherent or continuing "I" that experiences these sensations, much less the existence of an external world. On the other hand, if our standard is too low, then we admit follies and illusions into our body of knowledge. This argument against absolute skepticism asserts that the practical philosopher must move beyond solipsism, and accept a standard for knowledge that is high but not absolute.

Idealism

Idealism is the epistemological doctrine that nothing can be directly known outside of the minds of thinking beings. Or in an alternative stronger form, it is the metaphysical doctrine that nothing exists apart from minds and the "contents" of minds. In modern Western philosophy, the epistemological doctrine begins as a core tenet of Descartes—that what is in the mind is known more reliably than what is known through the senses. The first prominent modern Western idealist in the metaphysical sense was George Berkeley. Berkeley argued that there is no deep distinction between mental states, such as feeling pain, and the ideas about so-called "external" things, that appear to us through the senses. There is no real distinction, in this view, between certain sensations of heat and light that we experience, which lead us to believe in the external existence of a fire, and the fire itself. Those sensations are all there is to fire. Berkeley expressed this with the Latin formula ''esse est percipi'': "to be is to be perceived". In this view the opinion, "strangely prevailing upon men", that houses, mountains, and rivers have an existence independent of their perception by a thinking being is false.

Forms of idealism were prevalent in philosophy from the 18th century to the early 20th century. Transcendental idealism, advocated by Immanuel Kant, is the view that there are limits on what can be understood, since there is much that cannot be brought under the conditions of objective judgment. Kant wrote his ''Critique of Pure Reason'' (1781–1787) in an attempt to reconcile the conflicting approaches of rationalism and empiricism, and to establish a new groundwork for studying metaphysics. Kant's intention with this work was to look at what we know and then consider what must be true about it, as a logical consequence of the ''way'' we know it. One major theme was that there are fundamental features of reality that escape our direct knowledge because of the natural limits of the human faculties. Although Kant held that objective knowledge of the world required the mind to impose a conceptual or categorical framework on the stream of pure sensory data—a framework including space and time themselves—he maintained that ''things-in-themselves'' existed independently of our perceptions and judgments; he was therefore not an idealist in any simple sense. Indeed, Kant's account of ''things-in-themselves'' is both controversial and highly complex. Continuing his work, Johann Gottlieb Fichte and Friedrich Schelling dispensed with belief in the independent existence of the world, and created a thoroughgoing idealist philosophy.

The most notable work of this German idealism was G. W. F. Hegel's ''Phenomenology of Spirit'', of 1807. Hegel admitted his ideas were not new, but that all the previous philosophies had been incomplete. His goal was to correctly finish their job. Hegel asserts that the twin aims of philosophy are to account for the contradictions apparent in human experience (which arise, for instance, out of the supposed contradictions between "being" and "not being"), and also simultaneously to resolve and preserve these contradictions by showing their compatibility at a higher level of examination ("being" and "not being" are resolved with "becoming"). This program of acceptance and reconciliation of contradictions is known as the "Hegelian dialectic". Philosophers in the Hegelian tradition include Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach, who coined the term projection as pertaining to our inability to recognize anything in the external world without projecting qualities of ourselves upon those things; Karl Marx; Friedrich Engels; and the British idealists, notably T. H. Green, J. M. E. McTaggart and F. H. Bradley.

Few 20th century philosophers have embraced idealism. However, quite a few have embraced Hegelian dialectic. Immanuel Kant's "Copernican Turn" also remains an important philosophical concept today.

Pragmatism

Pragmatism was founded in the spirit of finding a scientific concept of truth that does not depend on personal insight (revelation) or reference to some metaphysical realm. The truth of a statement should be judged by the effect it has on our actions, and truth should be seen as what the whole of scientific enquiry ultimately agrees on. This should probably be seen as a guiding principle more than a definition of what it means for something to be true, though the details of how this principle should be interpreted have been subject to discussion since Charles S. Peirce first conceived it. Peirce's maxim of pragmatism is as follows: "Consider what effects, which might conceivably have practical bearings, we conceive the object of our conception to have. Then, our conception of these effects is the whole of our conceptions of the object." Like postmodern neo-pragmatist Richard Rorty, many are convinced that pragmatism asserts that the truth of beliefs does not consist in their correspondence with reality, but in their usefulness and efficacy.

The late 19th-century American philosophers Charles Sanders Peirce and William James were its co-founders, and it was later developed by John Dewey as instrumentalism. Since the usefulness of any belief at any time might be contingent on circumstance, Peirce and James conceptualised final truth as something only established by the future, final settlement of all opinion. Critics have accused pragmatism of falling victim to a simple fallacy: because something that is true proves useful, that usefulness is the basis for its truth. Thinkers in the pragmatist tradition have included John Dewey, George Santayana, W. V. O. Quine and C. I. Lewis. Pragmatism has more recently been taken in new directions by Richard Rorty, John Lachs, Donald Davidson, Susan Haack, and Hilary Putnam.

Phenomenology

Edmund Husserl's phenomenology was an ambitious attempt to lay the foundations for an account of the structure of conscious experience in general. An important part of Husserl's phenomenological project was to show that all conscious acts are directed at or about objective content, a feature that Husserl called ''intentionality''.

In the first part of his two-volume work, the ''Logical Investigations'' (1901), he launched an extended attack on psychologism. In the second part, he began to develop the technique of ''descriptive phenomenology'', with the aim of showing how objective judgments are indeed grounded in conscious experience—not, however, in the first-person experience of particular individuals, but in the properties essential to any experiences of the kind in question.

He also attempted to identify the essential properties of any act of meaning. He developed the method further in ''Ideas'' (1913) as ''transcendental phenomenology'', proposing to ground actual experience, and thus all fields of human knowledge, in the structure of consciousness of an ideal, or transcendental, ego. Later, he attempted to reconcile his transcendental standpoint with an acknowledgement of the intersubjective life-world in which real individual subjects interact. Husserl published only a few works in his lifetime, which treat phenomenology mainly in abstract methodological terms; but he left an enormous quantity of unpublished concrete analyses.

Husserl's work was immediately influential in Germany, with the foundation of phenomenological schools in Munich and Göttingen. Phenomenology later achieved international fame through the work of such philosophers as Martin Heidegger (formerly Husserl's research assistant), Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and Jean-Paul Sartre. Indeed, through the work of Heidegger and Sartre, Husserl's focus on subjective experience influenced aspects of existentialism.

Existentialism

Existentialism is a term applied to the work of a number of late 19th- and 20th-century philosophers who, despite profound doctrinal differences, shared the belief that philosophical thinking begins with the human subject—not merely the thinking subject, but the acting, feeling, living human individual. In existentialism, the individual's starting point is characterized by what has been called "the existential attitude", or a sense of disorientation and confusion in the face of an apparently meaningless or absurd world. Many existentialists have also regarded traditional systematic or academic philosophy, in both style and content, as too abstract and remote from concrete human experience.

Although they did not use the term, the 19th-century philosophers Søren Kierkegaard and Friedrich Nietzsche are widely regarded as the fathers of existentialism. Their influence, however, has extended beyond existentialist thought.

The main target of Kierkegaard's writings was the idealist philosophical system of Hegel which, he thought, ignored or excluded the inner subjective life of living human beings. Kierkegaard, conversely, held that "truth is subjectivity", arguing that what is most important to an actual human being are questions dealing with an individual's inner relationship to existence. In particular, Kierkegaard, a Christian, believed that the truth of religious faith was a subjective question, and one to be wrestled with passionately.

Although Kierkegaard and Nietzsche were among his influences, the extent to which the German philosopher Martin Heidegger should be considered an existentialist is debatable. In ''Being and Time'' he presented a method of rooting philosophical explanations in human existence (''Dasein'') to be analysed in terms of existential categories (''existentiale''); and this has led many commentators to treat him as an important figure in the existentialist movement. However, in ''The Letter on Humanism'', Heidegger explicitly rejected the existentialism of Jean-Paul Sartre.

Sartre became the best-known proponent of existentialism, exploring it not only in theoretical works such as ''Being and Nothingness'', but also in plays and novels. Sartre, along with Simone de Beauvoir, represented an avowedly atheistic branch of existentialism, which is now more closely associated with their ideas of nausea, contingency, bad faith, and the absurd than with Kierkegaard's spiritual angst. Nevertheless, the focus on the individual human being, responsible before the universe for the authenticity of his or her existence, is common to all these thinkers.

Structuralism and post-structuralism

Inaugurated by the linguist Ferdinand de Saussure, structuralism sought to clarify systems of signs through analyzing the discourses they both limit and make possible. Saussure conceived of the sign as being delimited by all the other signs in the system, and ideas as being incapable of existence prior to linguistic structure, which articulates thought. This led continental thought away from humanism, and toward what was termed the decentering of man: language is no longer spoken by man to express a true inner self, but language speaks man.

Structuralism sought the province of a hard science, but its positivism soon came under fire by poststructuralism, a wide field of thinkers, some of whom were once themselves structuralists, but later came to criticize it. Structuralists believed they could analyze systems from an external, objective standing, for example, but the poststructuralists argued that this is incorrect, that one cannot transcend structures and thus analysis is itself determined by what it examines, while the distinction between the signifier and signified was treated as crystalline by structuralists, poststructuralists asserted that every attempt to grasp the signified results in more signifiers, so meaning is always in a state of being deferred, making an ultimate interpretation impossible.

Structuralism came to dominate continental philosophy throughout the 1960s and early '70s, encompassing thinkers as diverse as Claude Lévi-Strauss, Roland Barthes and Jacques Lacan. Post-structuralism came to predominate over the 1970s onwards, including thinkers such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze and even Roland Barthes; it incorporated a critique of structuralism's limitations.

The analytic tradition

The term ''analytic philosophy'' roughly designates a group of philosophical methods that stress detailed argumentation, attention to semantics, use of classical logic and non-classical logics and clarity of meaning above all other criteria. Some have held that philosophical problems arise through misuse of language or because of misunderstandings of the logic of our language, while some maintain that there are genuine philosophical problems and that philosophy is continuous with science. Michael Dummett in his ''Origins of Analytical Philosophy'' makes the case for counting Gottlob Frege's ''The Foundations of Arithmetic'' as the first analytic work, on the grounds that in that book Frege took the linguistic turn, analyzing philosophical problems through language. Bertrand Russell and G.E. Moore are also often counted as founders of analytic philosophy, beginning with their rejection of British idealism, their defense of realism and the emphasis they laid on the legitimacy of analysis. Russell's classic works ''The Principles of Mathematics'', ''On Denoting'' and ''Principia Mathematica'' with Alfred North Whitehead, aside from greatly promoting the use of mathematical logic in philosophy, set the ground for much of the research program in the early stages of the analytic tradition, emphasizing such problems as: the reference of proper names, whether 'existence' is a property, the nature of propositions, the analysis of definite descriptions, the discussions on the foundations of mathematics; as well as exploring issues of ontological commitment and even metaphysical problems regarding time, the nature of matter, mind, persistence and change, which Russell tackled often with the aid of mathematical logic. Russell and Moore's philosophy, in the beginning of the 20th century, developed as a critique of Hegel and his British followers in particular, and of grand systems of speculative philosophy in general, though by no means all analytic philosophers reject the philosophy of Hegel (see Charles Taylor) nor speculative philosophy. Some schools in the group include logical positivism, and ordinary language both markedly influenced by Russell and Wittgenstein's development of Logical Atomism the former positively and the latter negatively.

In 1921, Ludwig Wittgenstein, who studied under Russell at Cambridge, published his ''Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus'', which gave a rigidly "logical" account of linguistic and philosophical issues. At the time, he understood most of the problems of philosophy as mere puzzles of language, which could be solved by investigating and then minding the logical structure of language. Years later, he reversed a number of the positions he set out in the ''Tractatus'', in for example his second major work, ''Philosophical Investigations'' (1953). ''Investigations'' was influential in the development of "ordinary language philosophy," which was promoted by Gilbert Ryle, J.L. Austin, and a few others. In the United States, meanwhile, the philosophy of W.V.O. Quine was having a major influence, with such classics as Two Dogmas of Empiricism. In that paper Quine criticizes the distinction between analytic and synthetic statements, arguing that a clear conception of analyticity is unattainable. He argued for holism, the thesis that language, including scientific language, is a set of interconnected sentences, none of which can be verified on its own, rather, the sentences in the language depend on each other for their meaning and truth conditions. A consequence of Quine's approach is that language as a whole has only a thin relation to experience. Some sentences that refer directly to experience might be modified by sense impressions, but as the whole of language is theory-laden, for the whole language to be modified, more than this is required. However, most of the linguistic structure can in principle be revised, even logic, in order to better model the world. Notable students of Quine include Donald Davidson and Daniel Dennett. The former devised a program for giving a semantics to natural language and thereby answer the philosophical conundrum "what is meaning?". A crucial part of the program was the use of Alfred Tarski's semantic theory of truth. Dummett, among others, argued that truth conditions should be dispensed within the theory of meaning, and replaced by assertibility conditions. Some propositions, on this view, are neither true nor false, and thus such a theory of meaning entails a rejection of the law of the excluded middle. This, for Dummett, entails antirealism, as Russell himself pointed out in his ''An Inquiry into Meaning and Truth''.

By the 1970s there was a renewed interest in many traditional philosophical problems by the younger generations of analytic philosophers. David Lewis, Saul Kripke, Derek Parfit and others took an interest in traditional metaphysical problems, which they began exploring by the use of logic and philosophy of language. Among those problems some distinguished ones were: free will, essentialism, the nature of personal identity, identity over time, the nature of the mind, the nature of causal laws, space-time, the properties of material beings, modality, etc. In those universities where analytic philosophy has spread, these problems are still being discussed passionately. Analytic philosophers are also interested in the methodology of analytic philosophy itself, with Timothy Williamson, Wykeham Professor of Logic at Oxford, publishing recently a book entitled ''The Philosophy of Philosophy''. Some influential figures in contemporary analytic philosophy are: Timothy Williamson, David Lewis, John Searle, Thomas Nagel, Hilary Putnam, Michael Dummett, Peter van Inwagen and Saul Kripke. Analytic philosophy has sometimes been accused of not contributing to the political debate or to traditional questions in aesthetics. However, with the appearance of ''A Theory of Justice'' by John Rawls and ''Anarchy, State and Utopia'' by Robert Nozick, analytic political philosophy acquired respectability. Analytic philosophers have also shown depth in their investigations of aesthetics, with Roger Scruton, Nelson Goodman, Arthur Danto and others developing the subject to its current shape.

Moral and political philosophy

Human nature and political legitimacy

From ancient times, and well beyond them, the roots of justification for political authority were inescapably tied to outlooks on human nature. In ''The Republic'', Plato presented the argument that the ideal society would be run by a council of philosopher-kings, since those best at philosophy are best able to realize the good. Even Plato, however, required philosophers to make their way in the world for many years before beginning their rule at the age of fifty. For Aristotle, humans are political animals (i.e. social animals), and governments are set up to pursue good for the community. Aristotle reasoned that, since the state (''polis'') was the highest form of community, it has the purpose of pursuing the highest good. Aristotle viewed political power as the result of natural inequalities in skill and virtue. Because of these differences, he favored an aristocracy of the able and virtuous. For Aristotle, the person cannot be complete unless he or she lives in a community. His ''The Nicomachean Ethics'' and ''The Politics'' are meant to be read in that order. The first book addresses virtues (or "excellences") in the person as a citizen; the second addresses the proper form of government to ensure that citizens will be virtuous, and therefore complete. Both books deal with the essential role of justice in civic life.

Nicolas of Cusa rekindled Platonic thought in the early 15th century. He promoted democracy in Medieval Europe, both in his writings and in his organization of the Council of Florence. Unlike Aristotle and the Hobbesian tradition to follow, Cusa saw human beings as equal and divine (that is, made in God's image), so democracy would be the only just form of government. Cusa's views are credited by some as sparking the Italian Renaissance, which gave rise to the notion of "Nation-States".

Later, Niccolò Machiavelli rejected the views of Aristotle and Thomas Aquinas as unrealistic. The ideal sovereign is not the embodiment of the moral virtues; rather the sovereign does whatever is successful and necessary, rather than what is morally praiseworthy. Thomas Hobbes also contested many elements of Aristotle's views. For Hobbes, human nature is essentially anti-social: people are essentially egoistic, and this egoism makes life difficult in the natural state of things. Moreover, Hobbes argued, though people may have natural inequalities, these are trivial, since no particular talents or virtues that people may have will make them safe from harm inflicted by others. For these reasons, Hobbes concluded that the state arises from a common agreement to raise the community out of the state of nature. This can only be done by the establishment of a sovereign, in which (or whom) is vested complete control over the community, and is able to inspire awe and terror in its subjects.

Many in the Enlightenment were unsatisfied with existing doctrines in political philosophy, which seemed to marginalize or neglect the possibility of a democratic state. Jean-Jacques Rousseau was among those who attempted to overturn these doctrines: he responded to Hobbes by claiming that a human is by nature a kind of "noble savage", and that society and social contracts corrupt this nature. Another critic was John Locke. In ''Second Treatise on Government'' he agreed with Hobbes that the nation-state was an efficient tool for raising humanity out of a deplorable state, but he argued that the sovereign might become an abominable institution compared to the relatively benign unmodulated state of nature.

Following the doctrine of the fact-value distinction, due in part to the influence of David Hume and his student Adam Smith, appeals to human nature for political justification were weakened. Nevertheless, many political philosophers, especially moral realists, still make use of some essential human nature as a basis for their arguments.

Marxism is derived from the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Their idea that capitalism is based on exploitation of workers and causes alienation of people from their human nature, the historical materialism, their view of social classes, etc., have influenced many fields of study, such as sociology, economics, and politics. Marxism inspired the Marxist school of communism, which brought a huge impact on the history of the 20th century.

Consequentialism, deontology, and the aretaic turn

One debate that has commanded the attention of ethicists in the modern era has been between consequentialism (actions are to be morally evaluated solely by their ''consequences'') and deontology (actions are to be morally evaluated solely by consideration of agents' ''duties'', the ''rights'' of those whom the action concerns, or both).

Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill are famous for propagating utilitarianism, which is the idea that the fundamental moral rule is to strive toward the "greatest happiness for the greatest number". However, in promoting this idea they also necessarily promoted the broader doctrine of consequentialism.

Adopting a position opposed to consequentialism, Immanuel Kant argued that moral principles were simply products of reason. Kant believed that the incorporation of consequences into moral deliberation was a deep mistake, since it denies the necessity of practical maxims in governing the working of the will. According to Kant, reason requires that we conform our actions to the categorical imperative, which is an absolute duty. An important 20th-century deontologist, W.D. Ross, argued for weaker forms of duties called ''prima facie'' duties.

More recent works have emphasized the role of character in ethics, a movement known as the ''aretaic turn'' (that is, the ''turn towards virtues''). One strain of this movement followed the work of Bernard Williams. Williams noted that rigid forms of consequentialism and deontology demanded that people behave impartially. This, Williams argued, requires that people abandon their personal projects, and hence their personal integrity, in order to be considered moral.

G.E.M. Anscombe, in an influential paper, "Modern Moral Philosophy" (1958), revived virtue ethics as an alternative to what was seen as the entrenched positions of Kantianism and consequentialism. Aretaic perspectives have been inspired in part by research of ancient conceptions of virtue. For example, Aristotle's ethics demands that people follow the ''Aristotelian mean'', or balance between two vices; and Confucian ethics argues that virtue consists largely in striving for harmony with other people. Virtue ethics in general has since gained many adherents, and has been defended by such philosophers as Philippa Foot, Alasdair MacIntyre, and Rosalind Hursthouse.

Applied philosophy

The ideas conceived by a society have profound repercussions on what actions the society performs. The applied study of philosophy yields applications such as those in ethics—applied ethics in particular—and political philosophy. The political and economic philosophies of Confucius, Sun Zi, Chanakya, Ibn Khaldun, Ibn Rushd, Ibn Taimiyyah, Niccolò Machiavelli, Gottfried Leibniz, John Locke, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith, Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, Mahatma Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr. and others—all of these have been used to shape and justify governments and their actions.

In the field of philosophy of education, progressive education as championed by John Dewey has had a profound impact on educational practices in the United States in the 20th century. Descendants of this movement include the current efforts in philosophy for children, which are part of philosophy education. Carl von Clausewitz's political philosophy of war has had a profound effect on statecraft, international politics, and military strategy in the 20th century, especially in the years around World War II. Logic has become crucially important in mathematics, linguistics, psychology, computer science, and computer engineering.

Other important applications can be found in epistemology, which aid in understanding the requisites for knowledge, sound evidence, and justified belief (important in law, economics, decision theory, and a number of other disciplines). The philosophy of science discusses the underpinnings of the scientific method and has affected the nature of scientific investigation and argumentation. As such, philosophy has fundamental implications for science as a whole. For example, the strictly empirical approach of Skinner's behaviorism affected for decades the approach of the American psychological establishment. Deep ecology and animal rights examine the moral situation of humans as occupants of a world that has non-human occupants to consider also. Aesthetics can help to interpret discussions of music, literature, the plastic arts, and the whole artistic dimension of life. In general, the various philosophies strive to provide practical activities with a deeper understanding of the theoretical or conceptual underpinnings of their fields.

Often philosophy is seen as an investigation into an area not sufficiently well understood to be its own branch of knowledge. What were once philosophical pursuits have evolved into the modern day fields such as psychology, sociology, linguistics, and economics, for example.

''The New York Times'' reported an increase in philosophy majors at United States universities in 2008.

See also

Lists of philosophers

List of philosophy journals

Philosophy and economics

Social theory

Unsolved problems in philosophy

References

Further reading

Introductions

Appiah, Kwame Anthony. ''Thinking it Through  – An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy'', 2003, ISBN 0-19-513458-3

Blumenau, Ralph. ''Philosophy and Living''. ISBN 0-907845-33-9

Craig, Edward. ''Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction''. ISBN 0-19-285421-6

Curley, Edwin, ''A Spinoza Reader'', Princeton, 1994, ISBN 0-691-00067-0

Durant, Will, ''Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of the World's Greatest Philosophers'', Pocket, 1991, ISBN 0-671-73916-6, ISBN 978-0-671-73916-4

Harrison-Barbet, Anthony, ''Mastering Philosophy''. ISBN 0-333-69343-4

Higgins, Kathleen M. and Solomon, Robert C. ''A Short History of Philosophy''. ISBN 0-19-510196-0

Philosophy Now magazine

Russell, Bertrand. ''The Problems of Philosophy''. ISBN 0-19-511552-X

Sinclair, Alistair J. ''What is Philosophy? An Introduction'', 2008, ISBN 978-1-903765-94-4

Sober, E. (2001). ''Core Questions in Philosophy: A Text with Readings''. Upper Saddle River, Prentice Hall. ISBN 0-13-189869-8

Solomon, Robert C. ''Big Questions: A Short Introduction to Philosophy''. ISBN 0-534-16708-X

Warburton, Nigel. ''Philosophy: The Basics''. ISBN 0-415-14694-1

Think: philosophy for everyone Lively and accessible articles written by philosophers pre-eminent in their fields, for a broad audience. Free articles are available online.

Topical introductions

Copleston, Frederick. ''Philosophy in Russia: From Herzen to Lenin and Berdyaev''. ISBN 0-268-01569-4

Critchley, Simon. ''Continental Philosophy: A Very Short Introduction''. ISBN 0-19-285359-7

Hamilton, Sue. ''Indian Philosophy: a Very Short Introduction''. ISBN 0-19-285374-0

Harwood, Sterling, ed., Business as Ethical and Business as Usual (Belmont, CA: Wadsworth Publishing Co., 2000); www.sterlingharwood.com

Imbo, Samuel Oluoch. '3'An Introduction to African Philosophy''. ISBN 0-8476-8841-0

Knight, Kelvin. ''Aristotelian Philosophy: Ethics and Politics from Aristotle to MacIntyre''. ISBN 0-7456-1977-0

Kupperman, Joel J. ''Classic Asian Philosophy: A Guide to the Essential Texts''. ISBN 0-19-513335-8

Leaman, Oliver. ''A Brief Introduction to Islamic Philosophy''. ISBN 0-7456-1960-6

Lee, Joe and Powell, Jim. ''Eastern Philosophy For Beginners''. ISBN 0-86316-282-7

Nagel, Thomas. ''What Does It All Mean? A Very Short Introduction to Philosophy''. ISBN 0-19-505292-7

Scruton, Roger. ''A Short History of Modern Philosophy''. ISBN 0-415-26763-3

Smart, Ninian. ''World Philosophies''. ISBN 0-415-22852-2

Tarnas, Richard. ''The Passion of the Western Mind: Understanding the Ideas That Have Shaped Our World View''. ISBN 0-345-36809-6

Anthologies

''Classics of Philosophy (Vols. 1 & 2, 2nd edition)'' by Louis P. Pojman

''Classics of Philosophy: The 20th Century (Vol. 3)'' by Louis P. Pojman

''The English Philosophers from Bacon to Mill'' by Edwin Arthur

''European Philosophers from Descartes to Nietzsche'' by Monroe Beardsley

''Contemporary Analytic Philosophy: Core Readings'' by James Baillie

''Existentialism: Basic Writings (Second Edition)'' by Charles Guignon, Derk Pereboom

''The Phenomenology Reader'' by Dermot Moran, Timothy Mooney

''Medieval Islamic Philosophical Writings'' edited by Muhammad Ali Khalidi

''A Source Book in Indian Philosophy'' by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan, Charles A. Moore

''A Source Book in Chinese Philosophy'' by Wing-tsit Chan

Kim, J. and Ernest Sosa, Ed. (1999). ''Metaphysics: An Anthology''. Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

''The Oxford Handbook of Free Will'' (2004) edited by Robert Kane

Husserl, Edmund and Donn Welton (1999). ''The Essential Husserl: Basic Writings in Transcendental Phenomenology'', Indiana University Press. ISBN 0-253-21273-1

Cottingham, John. Western Philosophy: An Anthology. 2nd ed. Malden, MA: Blackwell Pub., 2008. Print. Blackwell Philosophy Anthologies.

Reference works

''The Oxford Companion to Philosophy'' edited by Ted Honderich

''The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy'' by Robert Audi

''The Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (10 vols.) edited by Edward Craig, Luciano Floridi (available online by subscription); or

''The Concise Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' edited by Edward Craig (an abridgement)

''Encyclopedia of Philosophy'' (8 vols.) edited by Paul Edwards; in 1996, a ninth supplemental volume appeared that updated the classic 1967 encyclopedia.

''International Directory of Philosophy and Philosophers''. Charlottesville, Philosophy Documentation Center.

''Directory of American Philosophers''. Charlottesville, Philosophy Documentation Center.

''Routledge History of Philosophy'' (10 vols.) edited by John Marenbon

''History of Philosophy'' (9 vols.) by Frederick Copleston

''A History of Western Philosophy'' (5 vols.) by W. T. Jones

''History of Italian Philosophy'' (2 vols.) by Eugenio Garin. Translated from Italian and Edited by Giorgio Pinton. Introduction by Leon Pompa.

''Encyclopaedia of Indian Philosophies'' (8 vols.), edited by Karl H. Potter et al. (first 6 volumes out of print)

''Indian Philosophy'' (2 vols.) by Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan

''A History of Indian Philosophy'' (5 vols.) by Surendranath Dasgupta

''History of Chinese Philosophy'' (2 vols.) by Fung Yu-lan, Derk Bodde

''Encyclopedia of Chinese Philosophy'' edited by Antonio S. Cua

''Encyclopedia of Eastern Philosophy and Religion'' by Ingrid Fischer-Schreiber, Franz-Karl Ehrhard, Kurt Friedrichs

''Companion Encyclopedia of Asian Philosophy'' by Brian Carr, Indira Mahalingam

''A Concise Dictionary of Indian Philosophy: Sanskrit Terms Defined in English'' by John A. Grimes

''History of Islamic Philosophy'' edited by Seyyed Hossein Nasr, Oliver Leaman

''History of Jewish Philosophy'' edited by Daniel H. Frank, Oliver Leaman

''A History of Russian Philosophy: From the Tenth to the Twentieth Centuries'' by Valerii Aleksandrovich Kuvakin

Ayer, A.J. et al., Ed. (1994) ''A Dictionary of Philosophical Quotations''. Blackwell Reference Oxford. Oxford, Basil Blackwell Ltd.

Blackburn, S., Ed. (1996)''The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy''. Oxford, Oxford University Press.

Mauter, T., Ed. ''The Penguin Dictionary of Philosophy''. London, Penguin Books.

Runes, D., Ed. (1942). ''The Dictionary of Philosophy''. New York, The Philosophical Library, Inc.

Angeles, P.A., Ed. (1992). ''The Harper Collins Dictionary of Philosophy''. New York, Harper Perennial.

Bunnin, N. et al., Ed. (1996) ''The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy''. Blackwell Companions to Philosophy. Oxford, Blackwell Publishers Ltd.

Hoffman, Eric, Ed. (1997) ''Guidebook for Publishing Philosophy''. Charlottesville, Philosophy Documentation Center.

Popkin, R.H. (1999). ''The Columbia History of Western Philosophy''. New York, Columbia University Press.

External links

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

The Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy

Philosophy Timeline

Map of Western Philosophers

Philosophy Forums

Philosophy Magazines and Journals

Philosophy (review)

Philosophy OpenCourseWare from the University of Notre Dame

Philosophy Library

Philosophy Discussion Group

Philosophy Documentation Center

Popular Philosophy

Category:Article Feedback Pilot Category:Abstraction Category:Belief Category:Humanities Category:Greek loanwords

af:Filosofie am:ፍልስፍና ang:Ūðƿitegung ar:فلسفة an:Filosofía roa-rup:Filosofia as:দৰ্শন ast:Filosofía ay:Lup'intawi az:Fəlsəfə bn:দর্শন zh-min-nan:Tiat-ha̍k ba:Фәлсәфә be:Філасофія be-x-old:Філязофія bar:Philosophie bo:མཚན་ཉིད་རིག་པ། bs:Filozofija br:Prederouriezh bg:Философия ca:Filosofia cv:Философи ceb:Pilosopiya cs:Filosofie co:Filosofia cy:Athroniaeth da:Filosofi de:Philosophie et:Filosoofia el:Φιλοσοφία es:Filosofía eo:Filozofio ext:Filosofia eu:Filosofia fa:فلسفه hif:Philosophy fo:Heimspeki fr:Philosophie fy:Filosofy fur:Filosofie ga:Fealsúnacht gv:Fallsoonys gd:Feallsanachd gl:Filosofía gan:哲學 hak:Chet-ho̍k ko:철학 hy:Փիլիսոփայություն hi:दर्शन hr:Filozofija io:Filozofio ig:Ákọ na Uche ilo:Filosofia id:Filsafat ia:Philosophia ie:Filosofie iu:ᐃᓱᒪᓕᐅᕐᓂᖅ/isumaliurniq is:Heimspeki it:Filosofia he:פילוסופיה jv:Filsafat kl:Inuunerup isumalerineq kn:ತತ್ತ್ವಶಾಸ್ತ್ರ ka:ფილოსოფია csb:Filozofijô kk:Пәлсапа rw:Filozofi ky:Философия sw:Falsafa ht:Filozofi ku:Felsefe lad:Filosofía lo:ປັດຊະຍາ la:Philosophia lv:Filozofija lb:Philosophie lt:Filosofija lij:Filòsofia li:Filosofie jbo:pijyske lmo:Filusufia hu:Filozófia mk:Философија mg:Filôzôfia ml:തത്ത്വശാസ്ത്രം mr:तत्त्वज्ञान arz:فلسفه mzn:فلسفه ms:Falsafah mwl:Filosofie mn:Философи nah:Tlazohmatiliztli nl:Filosofie nds-nl:Filesefie ja:哲学 frr:Fiilosofii no:Filosofi nn:Filosofi nrm:Philosophie nov:Filosofia oc:Filosofia mhr:Философий uz:Falsafa pfl:Philosophie pnb:فلاسفی pap:Filosofia ps:فلسفه pcd:Filosofie tpi:Pilosopi nds:Philosophie pl:Filozofia pt:Filosofia kaa:Filosofiya ro:Filozofie rm:Filosofia qu:Yachay wayllukuy rue:Філозофія ru:Философия sah:Философия sa:तत्वज्ञानम् sg:Sêndândarä sc:Filosofia sco:Philosophy stq:Philosophie st:Filosofi sq:Filozofia scn:Filusufìa simple:Philosophy sk:Filozofia sl:Filozofija so:Filasoof ckb:فەلسەفە srn:Sabi fu denki sr:Филозофија sh:Filozofija su:Filsafat fi:Filosofia sv:Filosofi tl:Pilosopiya ta:மெய்யியல் kab:Tafelsuft tt:Fälsäfä te:తత్వము th:ปรัชญา tg:Фалсафа chr:ᎤᏬᎳᏨᎯ tr:Felsefe tk:Pelsepe uk:Філософія ur:فلسفہ ug:پەلسەپە za:Cwzyoz vec:Fiłoxofìa vi:Triết học vo:Filosop fiu-vro:Filosoofia wa:Filozofeye war:Pilosopiya wo:Xeltu yi:פילאסאפיע yo:Ìmòye zh-yue:哲學 diq:Felsefe zea:Filosofie bat-smg:Fėluosuopėjė zh:哲学

{{infobox philosopher | region

Western Philosophy | era 20th-century philosophy | color #B0C4DE | image Hilary Putnam.jpg | name Hilary Whitehall Putnam | birth_date July 31, 1926 | birth_place Chicago, Illinois, U.S. | school_tradition AnalyticPragmatism | main_interests Philosophy of mindPhilosophy of languagePhilosophy of mathematicsMetaphilosophyEpistemology | notable_ideas Multiple realizabilityFunctionalismCausal theory of referenceSemantic externalismBrain in a vat Twin EarthInternal realism | influences W.V.O. Quine, John Dewey, Hans Reichenbach, Alan Turing, Immanuel Kant, Nelson Goodman, Charles Sanders Peirce, William James, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Søren Kierkegaard, Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud | influenced Jerry Fodor, Ned Block, Joseph LeDoux, Tyler Burge, David Marr, Daniel Dennett, David Lewis, Donald Davidson }}

Hilary Whitehall Putnam (born July 31, 1926) is an American philosopher, mathematician and computer scientist, who has been a central figure in analytic philosophy since the 1960s, especially in philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, and philosophy of science. He is known for his willingness to apply an equal degree of scrutiny to his own philosophical positions as to those of others, subjecting each position to rigorous analysis until he exposes its flaws. As a result, he has acquired a reputation for frequently changing his own position. Putnam is currently Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University.

In philosophy of mind, Putnam is known for his argument against the type-identity of mental and physical states based on his hypothesis of the multiple realizability of the mental, and for the concept of functionalism, an influential theory regarding the mind-body problem. In philosophy of language, along with Saul Kripke and others, he developed the causal theory of reference, and formulated an original theory of meaning, inventing the notion of semantic externalism based on a famous thought experiment called Twin Earth.

In philosophy of mathematics, he and his mentor W. V. Quine developed the "Quine-Putnam indispensability thesis," an argument for the reality of mathematical entities, later espousing the view that mathematics is not purely logical, but "quasi-empirical". In the field of epistemology, he is known for his critique of the well known "brain in a vat" thought experiment. This thought experiment appears to provide a powerful argument for epistemological skepticism, but Putnam challenges its coherence. In metaphysics, he originally espoused a position called metaphysical realism, but eventually became one of its most outspoken critics, first adopting a view he called "internal realism", which he later abandoned in favor of a pragmatist-inspired direct realism. Putnam's "direct realism" aims to return the study of metaphysics to the way people actually experience the world, rejecting the idea of mental representations, sense data, and other intermediaries between mind and world. In his later work, Putnam has become increasingly interested in American pragmatism, Jewish philosophy, and ethics, thus engaging with a wider array of philosophical traditions. He has also displayed an interest in metaphilosophy, seeking to "renew philosophy" from what he identifies as narrow and inflated concerns.

Outside philosophy, Putnam has contributed to mathematics and computer science. Together with Martin Davis he developed the Davis–Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem and he helped demonstrate the unsolvability of Hilbert's tenth problem. He has been at times a politically controversial figure, especially for his involvement with the Progressive Labor Party in the late 1960s and early 1970s.

Personal life

Putnam was born in Chicago, Illinois in 1926. His father, Samuel Putnam, was a scholar of Romance languages, columnist and translator who wrote for the ''Daily Worker'', a publication of the American Communist Party from 1936 to 1946 (when he became disillusioned with communism). As a result of his father's commitment to communism, Putnam had a secular upbringing, although his mother, Riva, was Jewish. The family lived in France until 1934, when they returned to the United States, settling in Philadelphia. Putnam attended Central High School; there he met Noam Chomsky, who was a year behind him. The two have been friends—and often intellectual opponents—ever since. Putnam studied mathematics and philosophy at the University of Pennsylvania, receiving his BA (undergraduate degree) and becoming a member of the Philomathean Society, one of the oldest collegiate literary societies in the U.S. He went on to do graduate work in philosophy at Harvard University, and later at UCLA's Philosophy Department, where he received his Ph.D. in 1951 for a dissertation entitled "The Meaning of the Concept of Probability in Application to Finite Sequences". Putnam's teacher Hans Reichenbach (his dissertation supervisor) was a leading figure in logical positivism, the dominant school of philosophy of the day; one of Putnam's most consistent positions has been his rejection of logical positivism as self-defeating.

After briefly teaching at Northwestern, Princeton, and MIT, he moved to Harvard in 1965 with his wife, Ruth Anna Jacobs, who took a teaching position in philosophy at Wellesley College. Hilary and Ruth Anna were married in 1962. Ruth Anna Jacobs, descendant of a family with a long scholarly tradition in Gotha (her ancestor was the German classical scholar Christian Friedrich Wilhelm Jacobs), was born in Berlin, Germany, in 1927 to anti-Nazi political-activist parents and, like Putnam himself, she was raised an atheist (her mother was Jewish and her father had been from a Christian background). The Putnams, rebelling against the anti-Semitism that they had experienced during their youth, decided to establish a traditional Jewish home for their children. Since they had no experience with the rituals of Judaism, they sought out invitations to other Jews' homes for Seder. They had "no idea how to do it [themselves]", in the words of Ruth Anna. They therefore began to study Jewish ritual and Hebrew, and became more Jewishly interested, identified, and active. In 1994, Hilary Putnam celebrated a belated Bar Mitzvah service. His wife had a Bat Mitzvah service four years later.

Hilary was a popular teacher at Harvard. In keeping with the family tradition, he was politically active. In the 1960s and early 1970s, he was an active supporter of civil rights causes and an opponent of American military intervention in Vietnam. In 1963, he organized one of the first faculty and student committees at MIT against the war. Putnam was disturbed when he learned from reading the reports of David Halberstam that the U.S. was "defending" South Vietnamese peasants from the Vietcong by poisoning their rice crops. After moving to Harvard in 1965, he organized campus protests and began teaching courses on Marxism. Hilary became an official faculty advisor to the Students for a Democratic Society and, in 1968, became a member of the Progressive Labor Party (PLP).

He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1965. After 1968, his political activities were centered on the PLP. The Harvard administration considered these activities disruptive and attempted to censure Putnam, but two other faculty members criticized the procedures. Putnam permanently severed his ties with the PLP in 1972. In 1997, at a meeting of former draft resistance activists at Arlington Street Church in Boston, Putnam described his involvement with the PLP as a mistake. He said that he had been impressed at first with PLP's commitment to alliance-building, and its willingness to attempt to organize from within the armed forces.

In 1976, he was elected President of the American Philosophical Association. The following year, he was selected as Walter Beverly Pearson Professor of Mathematical Logic, in recognition of his contributions to philosophy of logic and mathematics. While breaking with his radical past, Putnam has never abandoned his belief that academics have a particular social and ethical responsibility toward society. He has continued to be forthright and progressive in his political views, as expressed in the articles "How Not to Solve Ethical Problems" (1983) and "Education for Democracy" (1993).

Putnam is a Corresponding Fellow of the British Academy. He retired from teaching in June 2000, but, as of 2009, he still gives a seminar almost yearly at Tel Aviv University. He is the Cogan University Professor Emeritus at Harvard University. He is also a founding patron of the small liberal arts college Ralston College. His corpus includes five volumes of collected works, seven books, and more than 200 articles. Putnam's renewed interest in Judaism has inspired him to publish several recent books and essays on the topic. With his wife, he has co-authored several books and essays on the late-19th century American pragmatist movement.

Philosophy of mind

Multiple realizability

Putnam's best-known work concerns philosophy of mind. His most noted original contributions to that field came in several key papers published in the late 1960s that set out the hypothesis of multiple realizability. In these papers, Putnam argues that, contrary to the famous claim of the type-identity theory, it is not necessarily true that "Pain is identical to C-fibre firing." Pain, according to Putnam's papers, may correspond to utterly different physical states of the nervous system in different organisms, and yet they all experience the same mental state of "being in pain".

Putnam cited examples from the animal kingdom to illustrate his thesis. He asked whether it was likely that the brain structures of diverse types of animals realize pain, or other mental states, the same way. If they do not share the same brain structures, they cannot share the same mental states and properties. The answer to this puzzle had to be that mental states were realized by different physical states in different species. Putnam then took his argument a step further, asking about such things as the nervous systems of alien beings, artificially intelligent robots and other silicon-based life forms. These hypothetical entities, he contended, should not be considered incapable of experiencing pain just because they lack the same neurochemistry as humans. Putnam concluded that type-identity theorists had been making an "ambitious" and "highly implausible" conjecture which could be disproven with one example of multiple realizability. This argument is sometimes referred to as the "likelihood argument".

Putnam formulated a complementary argument based on what he called "functional isomorphism". He defined the concept in these terms: "Two systems are functionally isomorphic if 'there is a correspondence between the states of one and the states of the other that preserves functional relations'." In the case of computers, two machines are functionally isomorphic if and only if the sequential relations among states in the first are exactly mirrored by the sequential relations among states in the other. Therefore, a computer made out of silicon chips and a computer made out of cogs and wheels can be functionally isomorphic but constitutionally diverse. Functional isomorphism implies multiple realizability. This argument is sometimes referred to as an "''a priori'' argument".

Jerry Fodor, Putnam, and others noted that, along with being an effective argument against type-identity theories, multiple realizability implies that any low-level explanation of higher-level mental phenomena is insufficiently abstract and general. Functionalism, which identifies mental kinds with functional kinds that are characterized exclusively in terms of causes and effects, abstracts from the level of microphysics, and therefore seemed to be a better explanation of the relation between mind and body. In fact, there are many functional kinds, such as mousetraps, software and bookshelves, which are multiply realized at the physical level.

Machine state functionalism

The first formulation of such a functionalist theory was put forth by Putnam himself. This formulation, which is now called "machine-state functionalism", was inspired by analogies noted by Putnam and others between the mind and theoretical "Turing machines" capable of computing any given algorithm.

In non-technical terms, a Turing machine can be visualized as an infinitely long tape divided into squares (the memory) with a box-shaped scanning device that sits over and scans one square of the memory at a time. Each square is either blank (''B'') or has a ''1'' written on it. These are the inputs to the machine. The possible outputs are:

Halt: Do nothing.

''R'': move one square to the right.

''L'': move one square to the left.

''B'': erase whatever is on the square.

''1'': erase whatever is on the square and print a ''1''.

A simple example of a Turing machine which writes out the sequence '111' after scanning three blank squares and then stopping is specified by the following machine table:

{| cellpadding="5" class="wikitable" |- ! ||State 1 || State 2 || State 3 |- |B || write 1; stay in state 1 || write 1; stay in state 2 || write 1; stay in state 3 |- |1 || go right; go to state 2 || go right; go to state 3 || [halt] |}

This table states that if the machine is in state one and scans a blank square (''B''), it will print a ''1'' and remain in state one. If it is in state one and reads a ''1'', it will move one square to the right and also go into state two. If it is in state two and reads a ''B'', it will print a ''1'' and stay in state two. If it's in state two and reads a ''1'', it will move one square to the right and go into state three. Finally, if it is in state three and reads a ''B'', it prints a ''1'' and remains in state three.

The point, for functionalism, is the nature of the "states" of the Turing machine. Each state can be defined in terms of its relations to the other states and to the inputs and outputs. State one, for example, is simply the state in which the machine, if it reads a ''B'', writes a ''1'' and stays in that state, and in which, if it reads a ''1'', it moves one square to the right and goes into a different state. This is the functional definition of state one; it is its causal role in the overall system. The details of how it accomplishes what it accomplishes and of its material constitution are completely irrelevant.

According to machine-state functionalism, the nature of a mental state is just like the nature of the automaton states described above. Just as "state one" simply is the state in which, given an input ''B'', such-and-such happens, so being in pain is the state which disposes one to cry "ouch", become distracted, wonder what the cause is, and so forth.

Rejection of functionalism

In the late 1980s, Putnam abandoned his adherence to functionalism and other computational theories of mind. His change of mind was primarily due to the difficulties that computational theories have in explaining certain intuitions with respect to the externalism of mental content. This is illustrated by Putnam's own Twin Earth thought experiment (see ''Philosophy of language''). He also developed a separate argument against functionalism in 1988, based on Fodor's generalized version of multiple realizability. Asserting that functionalism is really a watered-down identity theory in which mental kinds are identified with functional kinds, Putnam argued that mental kinds may be multiply realizable over functional kinds. The argument for functionalism is that the same mental state could be implemented by the different states of a universal Turing machine.

Despite Putnam's rejection of functionalism, it has continued to flourish and has been developed into numerous versions by thinkers as diverse as David Marr, Daniel Dennett, Jerry Fodor, and David Lewis. Functionalism helped lay the foundations for modern cognitive science and is the dominant theory of mind in philosophy today.

Philosophy of language

Semantic externalism

One of Putnam's contributions to philosophy of language is his claim that "meaning just ain't in the head". He illustrated this using his "Twin Earth" thought experiment to argue that environmental factors play a substantial role in determining meaning. Twin Earth shows this, according to Putnam, since on Twin Earth everything is identical to Earth, except that its lakes, rivers and oceans are filled with XYZ whereas those of earth are filled with H₂O. Consequently, when an earthling, Fredrick, uses the Earth-English word "water", it has a different meaning from the Twin Earth-English word "water" when used by his physically identical twin, Frodrick, on Twin Earth. Since Fredrick and Frodrick are physically indistinguishable when they utter their respective words, and since their words have different meanings, meaning cannot be determined solely by what is in their heads. This led Putnam to adopt a version of semantic externalism with regard to meaning and mental content. The late philosopher of mind and language Donald Davidson, despite his many differences of opinion with Putnam, wrote that semantic externalism constituted an "anti-subjectivist revolution" in philosophers' way of seeing the world. Since the time of Descartes, philosophers had been concerned with proving knowledge from the basis of subjective experience. Thanks to Putnam, Tyler Burge and others, Davidson said, philosophy could now take the objective realm for granted and start questioning the alleged "truths" of subjective experience.

Theory of meaning

Putnam, along with Saul Kripke, Keith Donnellan, and others, contributed to what is known as the causal theory of reference. In particular, Putnam maintained in ''The Meaning of "Meaning"'' that the objects referred to by natural kind terms—such as tiger, water, and tree—are the principal elements of the meaning of such terms. There is a linguistic division of labor, analogous to Adam Smith's economic division of labor, according to which such terms have their references fixed by the "experts" in the particular field of science to which the terms belong. So, for example, the reference of the term "lion" is fixed by the community of zoologists, the reference of the term "elm tree" is fixed by the community of botanists, and the reference of the term "table salt" is fixed as "NaCl" by chemists. These referents are considered rigid designators in the Kripkean sense and are disseminated outward to the linguistic community.

Putnam specifies a finite sequence of elements (a vector) for the description of the meaning of every term in the language. Such a vector consists of four components: # the object to which the term refers, e.g., the object individuated by the chemical formula H₂O; # a set of typical descriptions of the term, referred to as "the stereotype", e.g., "transparent", "colorless", and "hydrating"; # the semantic indicators that place the object into a general category, e.g., "natural kind" and "liquid"; # the syntactic indicators, e.g., "concrete noun" and "mass noun".

Such a "meaning-vector" provides a description of the reference and use of an expression within a particular linguistic community. It provides the conditions for its correct usage and makes it possible to judge whether a single speaker attributes the appropriate meaning to that expression or whether its use has changed enough to cause a difference in its meaning. According to Putnam, it is legitimate to speak of a change in the meaning of an expression only if the reference of the term, and not its stereotype, has changed. However, since there is no possible algorithm that can determine which aspect—the stereotype or the reference—has changed in a particular case, it is necessary to consider the usage of other expressions of the language. Since there is no limit to the number of such expressions which must be considered, Putnam embraced a form of semantic holism.

Philosophy of mathematics

Putnam made a significant contribution to philosophy of mathematics in the Quine–Putnam "indispensability argument" for mathematical realism. This argument is considered by Stephen Yablo to be one of the most challenging arguments in favor of the acceptance of the existence of abstract mathematical entities, such as numbers and sets. The form of the argument is as follows.

# One must have ontological commitments to ''all'' entities that are indispensable to the best scientific theories, and to those entities ''only'' (commonly referred to as "all and only"). # Mathematical entities are indispensable to the best scientific theories. Therefore, # One must have ontological commitments to mathematical entities.

The justification for the first premise is the most controversial. Both Putnam and Quine invoke naturalism to justify the exclusion of all non-scientific entities, and hence to defend the "only" part of "all and only". The assertion that "all" entities postulated in scientific theories, including numbers, should be accepted as real is justified by confirmation holism. Since theories are not confirmed in a piecemeal fashion, but as a whole, there is no justification for excluding any of the entities referred to in well-confirmed theories. This puts the nominalist who wishes to exclude the existence of sets and non-Euclidean geometry, but to include the existence of quarks and other undetectable entities of physics, for example, in a difficult position.

Putnam holds the view that mathematics, like physics and other empirical sciences, uses both strict logical proofs and "quasi-empirical" methods. For example, Fermat's last theorem states that for no integer $n>2$ are there positive integer values of ''x'', ''y'', and ''z'' such that $x^n+y^n=z^n$. Before this was proven for all $n>2$ in 1995 by Andrew Wiles, it had been proven for many values of ''n''. These proofs inspired further research in the area, and formed a quasi-empirical consensus for the theorem. Even though such knowledge is more conjectural than a strictly proven theorem, it was still used in developing other mathematical ideas.

Mathematics and computer science

Putnam has contributed to scientific fields not directly related to his work in philosophy. As a mathematician, Putnam contributed to the resolution of Hilbert's tenth problem in mathematics. Yuri Matiyasevich had formulated a theorem involving the use of Fibonacci numbers in 1970, which was designed to answer the question of whether there is a general algorithm that can decide whether a given system of Diophantine equations (polynomials with integer coefficients) has a solution among the integers. Putnam, working with Martin Davis and Julia Robinson, demonstrated that Matiyasevich's theorem was sufficient to prove that no such general algorithm can exist. It was therefore shown that David Hilbert's famous tenth problem has no solution.

In computability theory, Putnam investigated the structure of the ramified analytical hierarchy, its connection with the constructible hierarchy and its Turing degrees. He showed that there exist many levels of the constructible hierarchy which do not add any subsets of the integers and later, with his student George Boolos, that the first such "non-index" is the ordinal $\backslash beta\_0$ of ramified analysis (this is the smallest $\backslash beta$ such that $L\_\backslash beta$ is a model of full second-order comprehension), and also, together with a separate paper with Richard Boyd (another of Putnam's students) and Gustav Hensel, how the Davis–Mostowski–Kleene hyperarithmetical hierarchy of arithmetical degrees can be naturally extended up to $\backslash beta\_0$.

In computer science, Putnam is known for the Davis-Putnam algorithm for the Boolean satisfiability problem (SAT), developed with Martin Davis in 1960. The algorithm finds if there is a set of true or false values that satisfies a given Boolean expression so that the entire expression becomes true. In 1962, they further refined the algorithm with the help of George Logemann and Donald W. Loveland. It became known as the DPLL algorithm. This algorithm is efficient and still forms the basis of most complete SAT solvers.

Epistemology

In the field of epistemology, Putnam is known for his "brain in a vat" thought experiment (a modernized version of Descartes' evil demon hypothesis). The argument is that one cannot coherently state that one is a disembodied "brain in a vat" placed there by some "mad scientist".

This follows from the causal theory of reference. Words always refer to the kinds of things they were coined to refer to, thus the kinds of things their user, or the user's ancestors, experienced. So, if some person, Mary, were a "brain in a vat", whose every experience is received through wiring and other gadgetry created by the "mad scientist", then Mary's idea of a "brain" would not refer to a "real" brain, since she and her linguistic community have never seen such a thing. Rather, she saw something that looked like a brain, but was actually an image fed to her through the wiring. Similarly, her idea of a "vat" would not refer to a "real" vat. So, if, as a "brain in a vat", she were to say "I'm a brain in a vat", she would actually be saying "I'm a brain-image in a vat-image", which is incoherent. On the other hand, if she is not a "brain in a vat", then saying that she is still incoherent, but now because she actually means the opposite. This is a form of epistemological externalism: knowledge or justification depends on factors outside the mind and is not solely determined internally.

Putnam has clarified that his real target in this argument was never skepticism, but metaphysical realism. Since realism of this kind assumes the existence of a gap between how man conceives the world and the way the world really is, skeptical scenarios such as this one (or Descartes' Evil demon) present a formidable challenge. Putnam, by arguing that such a scenario is impossible, attempts to show that this notion of a gap between man's concept of the world and the way it is in itself is absurd. Man cannot have a "God's eye" view of reality. He is limited to his conceptual schemes. Metaphysical realism is therefore false, according to Putnam.

Metaphilosophy and ontology

In the late 1970s and the 1980s, stimulated by results from mathematical logic and by some ideas of Quine, Putnam abandoned his long-standing defence of metaphysical realism—the view that the categories and structures of the external world are both causally and ontologically independent of the conceptualizations of the human mind. He adopted a rather different view, which he called "internal realism".

Putnam renounced internal realism in his reply to Simon Blackburn in the volume ''Reading Putnam''. The reasons he gave up his "antirealism" are stated in the first three of his replies in "The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam", an issue of the journal ''Philosophical Topics'', where he gives a history of his use(s) of the term "internal realism", and, at more length, in his ''The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body and World'' (1999).

Internal realism was the view that, although the world may be ''causally'' independent of the human mind, the structure of the world—its division into kinds, individuals and categories—is a function of the human mind, and hence the world is not ''ontologically'' independent. The general idea is influenced by Kant's idea of the dependence of our knowledge of the world on the "categories of thought".

The problem with metaphysical realism, according to Putnam, was that it fails to explain the possibility of reference and truth. According to the metaphysical realist, our concepts and categories refer because they match up in some mysterious manner with the pre-structured categories, kinds and individuals that are inherent in the external world. But how is it possible that the world "carves up" into certain structures and categories, the mind carves up the world into its own categories and structures, and the two "carvings" perfectly coincide? The answer must be that the world does not come pre-structured but that structure must be imposed on it by the human mind and its conceptual schemes. In ''Reason, Truth, and History'', Putnam identified truth with what he termed "idealized rational acceptability." The theory, which owes something to C.S. Peirce, is that a belief is true if it would be accepted by anyone under ideal epistemic conditions.

Nelson Goodman had formulated a similar notion in ''Fact, Fiction and Forecast'' in 1956. In that work, Goodman went as far as to suggest that there is "no one world, but many worlds, each created by the human mind." Putnam rejected this form of social constructivism, but retained the idea that there can be many correct descriptions of reality. No one of these descriptions can be scientifically proven to be the "one, true" description of the world. This does not imply relativism, for Putnam, because not ''all'' descriptions are equally correct and the ones that are correct are not determined subjectively.

Under the influence of C.S. Peirce and William James, Putnam also became convinced that there is no fact–value dichotomy; that is, ethical and aesthetic judgments often have a factual basis, while scientific judgments have an ethical element.

Neopragmatism and Wittgenstein

At the end of the 1980s, Putnam became increasingly disillusioned with what he perceived as the "scientism" and the rejection of history that characterize modern analytic philosophy. He rejected internal realism because it assumed a "cognitive interface" model of the relation between the mind and the world. Under the increasing influence of James and the pragmatists, he adopted a direct realist view of this relation. For a time, under the influence of Ludwig Wittgenstein, he adopted a pluralist view of philosophy itself and came to view most philosophical problems as nothing more than conceptual or linguistic confusions created by philosophers by using ordinary language out of its original context. More recently,however, in "From Quantum Mechanics to Ethics and Back Again," forthcoming in Mario De Caro and David Macarthur (eds.), ''Philosophy in an Age of Science'', Harvard University Press, Putnam writes "Let me say for the record that I utterly and totally reject all versions of the “end of philosophy” story, whether they come from Wittgensteinians, Rortians, Heidegerians, Derridians, or whoever."

Many of Putnam's most recent works have addressed the concerns of ordinary people, particularly their concerns about social problems. For example, he has written about the nature of democracy, social justice and religion. He has discussed the ideas of the continental philosopher, Jürgen Habermas, and has written articles influenced by "continental" ideas.

Criticism

Putnam himself may be his own most formidable philosophical adversary. His frequent changes of mind have led him to attack his previous positions. However, many significant criticisms of his views have come from other philosophers and scientists. For example, multiple realizability has been criticized on the grounds that, if it were true, research and experimentation in the neurosciences would be impossible. According to Bechtel and Mundale, to be able to conduct such research in the neurosciences, universal consistencies must either exist or be assumed to exist in brain structures. It is the similarity (or homology) of brain structures that allows us to generalize across species. If multiple realizability were an empirical fact, results from experiments conducted on one species of animal (or one organism) would not be meaningful when generalized to explain the behavior of another species (or organism of the same species). Other criticisms of MR have been proposed by Jaegwon Kim, David Lewis, Robert Richardson and Patricia Churchland.

One of the main arguments against functionalism was formulated by Putnam himself: the Twin Earth thought experiment. However, there have been other criticisms. The Chinese room argument by John Searle (1980) is a direct attack on the claim that thought can be represented as a set of functions. The thought experiment is designed to show that it is possible to mimic intelligent action, without any interpretation or understanding, through the use of a purely functional system. In short, Searle describes a situation in which a person who speaks only English is locked in a room with Chinese symbols in baskets and a rule book in English for moving the symbols around. The person is instructed, by people outside the room, to follow the rule book for sending certain symbols out of the room when given certain symbols. Further, suppose that the people outside the room are Chinese speakers and are communicating with the person inside via the Chinese symbols. According to Searle, it would be absurd to claim that the English speaker inside "knows" Chinese based on these syntactic processes alone. This thought experiment attempts to show that systems that operate merely on syntactic processes cannot realize any semantics (meaning) or intentionality (aboutness). Thus, Searle attacks the idea that thought can be equated with the following of a set of syntactic rules. Thus, functionalism is an inadequate theory of the mind. Several other arguments against functionalism have been advanced by Ned Block.

Putnam has consistently adhered to the idea of semantic holism, in spite of the many changes in his other positions. The problems with this position have been described by Michael Dummett, Jerry Fodor, Ernest Lepore, and others. In the first place, they suggest that, if semantic holism is true, it is impossible to understand how a speaker of a language can learn the meaning of an expression, for any expression of the language. Given the limits of our cognitive abilities, we will never be able to master the whole of the English (or any other) language, even based on the (false) assumption that languages are static and immutable entities. Thus, if one must understand all of a natural language to understand a single word or expression, language learning is simply impossible. Semantic holism also fails to explain how two speakers can mean the same thing when using the same linguistic expression, and therefore how any communication at all is possible between them. Given a sentence ''P'', since Fred and Mary have each mastered different parts of the English language and ''P'' is related differently to the sentences in each part, the result is that ''P'' means one thing for Fred and something else for Mary. Moreover, if a sentence ''P'' derives its meaning from its relations with all of the sentences of a language, as soon as the vocabulary of an individual changes by the addition or elimination of a sentence, the totality of relations changes, and therefore also the meaning of ''P''. As this is a common phenomenon, the result is that ''P'' has two different meanings in two different moments in the life of the same person. Consequently, if I accept the truth of a sentence and then reject it later on, the meaning of that which I rejected and that which I accepted are completely different and therefore I cannot change my opinions with regard to the same sentences.

The brain in a vat argument has also been subject to criticism. Crispin Wright argues that Putnam's formulation of the brain-in-a-vat scenario is too narrow to refute global skepticism. The possibility that one is a recently disembodied brain in a vat is not undermined by semantic externalism. If a person has lived her entire life outside the vat—speaking the English language and interacting normally with the outside world—prior to her "envatment" by a mad scientist, when she wakes up inside the vat, her words and thoughts (e.g., "tree" and "grass") will still refer to the objects or events in the external world that they referred to before her envatment. In another scenario, a brain in a vat may be hooked up to a supercomputer that randomly generates perceptual experiences. In this case, one's words and thoughts would not refer to anything, and would therefore be devoid of content. Semantics would no longer exist and the argument would be meaningless.

In philosophy of mathematics, Stephen Yablo has argued that the Quine–Putnam indispensability thesis does not demonstrate that mathematical entities are truly indispensable. The argumentation is sophisticated, but the upshot is that one can achieve the same logical results by simply replacing all occurrences of the expression "so-and-so exists" (e.g., numbers exist) by occurrences of the expression "so-and-so is assumed (or hypothesized) to exist". For example, one can take the argument for indispensability described above and replace all references to existent entities with references to entities assumed to exist as follows. : 1*. One must have ontological commitments to all and only the entities ''that are assumed to exist'' and are indispensable to the best scientific theories. : 2*. Mathematical entities ''that are assumed to exist'' are indispensable to the best scientific theories. Therefore, : 3*. One must have ontological commitments to mathematical entities ''that are assumed to exist''.

Finally, Putnam's internal realism has been accused by Curtis Brown of being a disguised form of subjective idealism. If this is the case, it is subject to the traditional arguments against that position. In particular, it falls into the trap of solipsism. That is, if existence depends on experience, as subjective idealism maintains, and if one's consciousness were to stop existing, then the rest of the universe would stop existing as well.

Academic genealogy

{{academia |teachers=Hans ReichenbachMorton White W.V.O. Quine |students=David LewisGeorge BoolosPaul BenacerrafNorman DanielsNed BlockAlva NoëRichard BoydRobert BrandomHartry FieldJerry FodorGeorges ReyNorbert HornsteinElliott SoberJerrold KatzRaymond Smullyan}}

Major works

''The "Innateness Hypothesis" and Explanatory Models in Linguistics'', 1967.

''Philosophy of Mathematics: Selected Readings''. Edited with Paul Benacerraf. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall, 1964. 2nd ed., Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. ISBN 0-521-29648-X

''Philosophy of Logic''. New York: Harper and Row, 1971. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1972. ISBN 0-04-160009-6

''Mathematics, Matter and Method. Philosophical Papers, vol. 1''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 2nd. ed., 1985 paperback: ISBN 0-521-29550-5

''Mind, Language and Reality. Philosophical Papers, vol. 2''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. 2003 paperback: ISBN 0-521-29551-3

''Meaning and the Moral Sciences''. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1978.

''Reason, Truth, and History''. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981. 2004 paperback: ISBN 0-521-29776-1

''Realism and Reason. Philosophical Papers, vol. 3.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. 2002 paperback: ISBN 0-521-31394-5

''Methodology, Epistemology, and Philosophy of Science: Essays in Honour of Wolfgang Stegmüller''. edited with Wilhelm K. Essler and Carl G. Hempel. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1983.

''Epistemology, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science: Essays in Honour of Carl G. Hempel''. edited with Wilhelm K. Essler and Wolfgang Stegmüller. Dordrecht: D. Reidel, 1985.

''The Many Faces of Realism''. La Salle, Ill.: Open Court, 1987. ISBN 0-8126-9043-5

''Representation and Reality''. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988. ISBN 0-262-66074-1

''Realism with a Human Face''. edited by James F. Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1990. ISBN 0-674-74945-6

''Renewing Philosophy''. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-674-76094-8

''Pursuits of Reason: Essays in Honor of Stanley Cavell''. edited with Ted Cohen and Paul Guyer. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1993. ISBN 0-89672-266-X

''Words and Life''. edited by James F. Conant. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-674-95607-9

''Pragmatism: An Open Question''. Oxford: Blackwell, 1995. ISBN 0-631-19343-X

''The Threefold Cord: Mind, Body, and World''. New York: Columbia University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-231-10287-9

''Enlightenment and Pragmatism''. Assen: Koninklijke Van Gorcum, 2001. 48pp.

''The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays''. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. Description. ISBN 0-674-01380-8

''Ethics Without Ontology''. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2002. ISBN 0-674-01851-6

''Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein''. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008.

''Philosophy in an Age of Science''. edited by Mario De Caro and David Macarthur. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, forthcoming.

Works about Putnam

Y. Ben-Menahem (ed.), ''Hilary Putnam'', Contemporary Philosophy in Focus, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 2005.

P. Clark-B. Hale (eds.), ''Reading Putnam'', Blackwell, Cambridge (Massachusetts)-Oxford 1995.

C.S. Hill (ed.), ''The Philosophy of Hilary Putnam'', Fayetteville, Arkansas 1992.

M. Rüdel, ''Erkenntnistheorie und Pragmatik: Untersuchungen zu Richard Rorty und Hilary Putnam'', (Dissertation) Hamburg 1987.

Maximilian de Gaynesford ''Hilary Putnam'' McGill-Queens University Press / Acumen, 2006.

See also

American philosophy

List of American philosophers

Rietdijk–Putnam argument

Notes

References

External links

Harvard University Philosophy Faculty page

An extensive bibliography

An extensive directory

''London Review of Books'' contributor page

Hilary Putnam: On Mind, Meaning and Reality, Interview by Josh Harlan, ''The Harvard Review of Philosophy'', spring 1992.

Putnam, Hilary and Ruth Anna, "The Quarrel Between Poetry and Philosophy", read to the Santayana Society at its annual meeting in New York on December 28, 1995.

"To Think with Integrity", Hilary Putnam's Farewell Lecture, ''The Harvard Review of Philosophy'', Spring 2000.

Putnam, "The Depths and Shallows of Experience", video lecture, UCSB, September 1, 2003. Comments by Hubert Schwyzer and Bruno Latour.

Putnam, "The Fact/Value Dichotomy and its critics"; Roundtable on Externalism audio/video lecture, audio discussion, March 2007, University College Dublin.

Hilary Putnam - Externalism: Its Motivation And Its Critics, video of a lecture, delivered at Harvard University on October 4, 2007

A short film about the Putnam-Rorty debate and its influence on the pragmatist revival

''The Moscow Center for Consciousness Studies'' video interview with Hilary Putnam 2010-04-21

Category:20th-century philosophers Category:American Jews Category:American mathematicians Category:American philosophers Category:Analytic philosophers Category:Harvard University alumni Category:Harvard University faculty Category:Jewish philosophers Category:Living people Category:Metaphysicians Category:Patrons of Ralston College Category:Philosophers of language Category:Philosophers of mathematics Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Philosophers of science Category:Pragmatists Category:University of Pennsylvania alumni Category:University of California, Los Angeles alumni Category:1926 births Category:Gifford Lecturers Category:Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences

ar:هيلاري پوتنام bg:Хилари Пътнам ca:Hilary Putnam cs:Hilary Putnam de:Hilary Putnam es:Hilary Putnam fa:هیلاری پاتنم fr:Hilary Putnam gl:Hilary Putnam ko:힐러리 퍼트넘 is:Hilary Putnam it:Hilary Putnam he:הילארי פטנאם ht:Hilary Putnam lv:Hilarijs Patnems hu:Hilary Putnam ro:Hilary Putnam nl:Hilary Putnam ja:ヒラリー・パトナム no:Hilary Putnam pl:Hilary Putnam pt:Hilary Putnam ru:Патнэм, Хилари Уайтхолл sk:Hilary Putnam sr:Хилари Патнам fi:Hilary Putnam sv:Hilary Putnam zh:希拉里·怀特哈尔·普特南

region	Western Philosophy
era	17th-century philosophy
color	#B0C4DE
name	René Descartes
birth date	March 31, 1596
birth place	La Haye en Touraine, Touraine (present-day Descartes, Indre-et-Loire), France
death date	February 11, 1650
death place	Stockholm, Sweden
school tradition	Cartesianism, Rationalism, Foundationalism
religion	Roman Catholic
main interests	Metaphysics, Epistemology, Mathematics
influences	Plato, Aristotle, Alhazen, Ghazali, Averroes, Avicenna, Anselm, St. Augustine, Aquinas, Ockham, Suarez, Mersenne, Sextus Empiricus, Michel de Montaigne, Duns Scotus
influenced	Most philosophers after him including: Spinoza, Hobbes, Arnauld, Malebranche, Pascal, Locke, Leibniz, More, Kant, Husserl, Brunschvicg, Žižek, Chomsky, Stanley, Dirck Rembrantsz van Nierop, Durkheim
notable ideas	Cogito ergo sum, method of doubt, Cartesian coordinate system, Cartesian dualism, ontological argument for the existence of Christian God; Folium of Descartes
signature	Firma Descartes.svg }}

René Descartes ; (31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) (Latinized form: ''Renatus Cartesius''; adjectival form: "Cartesian") was a French philosopher and writer who spent most of his adult life in the Dutch Republic. He has been dubbed the 'Father of Modern Philosophy', and much subsequent Western philosophy is a response to his writings, which are studied closely to this day. In particular, his ''Meditations on First Philosophy'' continues to be a standard text at most university philosophy departments. Descartes' influence in mathematics is equally apparent; the Cartesian coordinate system—allowing algebraic equations to be expressed as geometric shapes (2D coordinate system)—was named after him. He is credited as the father of analytical geometry, the bridge between algebra and geometry, crucial to the discovery of infinitesimal calculus and analysis. Descartes was also one of the key figures in the Scientific Revolution.

Descartes frequently sets his views apart from those of his predecessors. In the opening section of the ''Passions of the Soul'', a treatise on the Early Modern version of what are now commonly called emotions, Descartes goes so far as to assert that he will write on this topic "as if no one had written on these matters before". Many elements of his philosophy have precedents in late Aristotelianism, the revived Stoicism of the 16th century, or in earlier philosophers like St. Augustine. In his natural philosophy, he differs from the schools on two major points: First, he rejects the analysis of corporeal substance into matter and form; second, he rejects any appeal to ends—divine or natural—in explaining natural phenomena. In his theology, he insists on the absolute freedom of God’s act of creation.

Descartes was a major figure in 17th-century continental rationalism, later advocated by Baruch Spinoza and Gottfried Leibniz, and opposed by the empiricist school of thought consisting of Hobbes, Locke, Berkeley, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Hume. Leibniz, Spinoza and Descartes were all well versed in mathematics as well as philosophy, and Descartes and Leibniz contributed greatly to science as well.

He is perhaps best known for the philosophical statement "''Cogito ergo sum''" (; ), found in part IV of ''Discourse on the Method'' (1637 – written in French but with inclusion of "Cogito ergo sum") and §7 of part I of ''Principles of Philosophy'' (1644 – written in Latin).

Biography

Descartes was born in La Haye en Touraine (now Descartes), Indre-et-Loire, France. When he was one year old, his mother Jeanne Brochard died. His father Joachim was a member in the provincial parliament. At the age of eight, he entered the Jesuit Collège Royal Henry-Le-Grand at La Flèche. After graduation, he studied at the University of Poitiers, earning a ''Baccalauréat'' and ''Licence'' in law in 1616, in accordance with his father's wishes that he should become a lawyer.

"I entirely abandoned the study of letters. Resolving to seek no knowledge other than that of which could be found in myself or else in the great book of the world, I spent the rest of my youth traveling, visiting courts and armies, mixing with people of diverse temperaments and ranks, gathering various experiences, testing myself in the situations which fortune offered me, and at all times reflecting upon whatever came my way so as to derive some profit from it." (Descartes, ''Discourse on the Method'').

In 1618, Descartes joined the International College of War of Maurice of Nassau in the Dutch Republic. On 10 November 1618, while walking through Breda, Descartes met Isaac Beeckman, who sparked his interest in mathematics and the new physics, particularly the problem of the fall of heavy bodies. While in the service of the Duke Maximilian of Bavaria, Descartes was present at the Battle of the White Mountain outside Prague, in November 1620.

On the night of 10–11 November 1619, while stationed in Neuburg an der Donau, Germany, Descartes experienced a series of three powerful dreams or visions that he later claimed profoundly influenced his life. In the first of these dreams, Descartes found himself buffeted and thrown down by a powerful whirlwind while walking near a college. In the second, he was awoken by an inexplicable thunder or explosion-like sound in his head to see sparks coming from the stove in his room. In the third dream, he finds a great dictionary and an anthology of ancient Latin poets on his bedside table. In the latter book, he reads a verse that begins, "What path shall I follow in life?" Descartes concluded from these visions that the pursuit of science would prove to be, for him, the pursuit of true wisdom and a central part of his life's work.

In 1622 he returned to France, and during the next few years spent time in Paris and other parts of Europe. He arrived in La Haye in 1623, selling all of his property to invest in bonds, which provided a comfortable income for the rest of his life. Descartes was present at the siege of La Rochelle by Cardinal Richelieu in 1627.

He returned to the Dutch Republic in 1628, where he lived until September 1649. In April 1629 he joined the University of Franeker, living at the Sjaerdemaslot, and the next year, under the name "Poitevin", he enrolled at the Leiden University to study mathematics with Jacob Golius and astronomy with Martin Hortensius. In October 1630 he had a falling out with Beeckman, who he accused of plagiarizing some of his ideas. In Amsterdam, he had a relationship with a servant girl, Helena Jans van der Strom, with whom he had a daughter, Francine, who was born in 1635 in Deventer, at which time Descartes taught at the Utrecht University. Francine Descartes died in 1640 in Amersfoort, from Scarlet Fever.

While in the Netherlands he changed his address frequently, living among other places in Dordrecht (1628), Franeker (1629), Amsterdam (1629–30), Leiden (1630), Amsterdam (1630–32), Deventer (1632–34), Amsterdam (1634–35), Utrecht (1635–36), Leiden (1636), Egmond (1636–38), Santpoort (1638–1640), Leiden (1640–41), Endegeest (a castle near Oegstgeest) (1641–43), and finally for an extended time in Egmond-Binnen (1643–49).

Despite these frequent moves he wrote all his major work during his 20 plus years in the Netherlands, where he managed to revolutionize mathematics and philosophy. In 1633, Galileo was condemned by the Roman Catholic Church, and Descartes abandoned plans to publish ''Treatise on the World'', his work of the previous four years. "Discourse on the Method" was published in 1637. In it Descartes lays out four rules of thought, meant to ensure that our knowledge rests upon a firm foundation.

Descartes continued to publish works concerning both mathematics and philosophy for the rest of his life. In 1643, Cartesian philosophy was condemned at the University of Utrecht, and Descartes began his long correspondence with Princess Elisabeth of Bohemia. In 1647, he was awarded a pension by the King of France. Descartes was interviewed by Frans Burman at Egmond-Binnen in 1648.

René Descartes died on 11 February 1650 in Stockholm, Sweden, where he had been invited as a tutor for Queen Christina of Sweden. The cause of death was said to be pneumonia—accustomed to working in bed until noon, he may have suffered a detrimental effect on his health due to Christina's demands for early morning study (the lack of sleep could have severely compromised his immune system). Others believe that Descartes may have contracted pneumonia as a result of nursing a French ambassador, Dejion A. Nopeleen, ill with the aforementioned disease, back to health. In his recent book, ''Der rätselhafte Tod des René Descartes'' (The Mysterious Death of René Descartes), the German philosopher Theodor Ebert asserts that Descartes died not through natural causes, but from an arsenic-laced communion wafer given to him by a Catholic priest. He believes that Jacques Viogué, a missionary working in Stockholm, administered the poison because he feared Descartes's radical theological ideas would derail an expected conversion to Roman Catholicism by the monarch of Protestant Lutheran Sweden.

In 1663, the Pope placed his works on the Index of Prohibited Books.

As a Roman Catholic in a Protestant nation, he was interred in a graveyard mainly used for unbaptized infants in Adolf Fredriks kyrkan in Stockholm. Later, his remains were taken to France and buried in the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés in Paris. Although the National Convention in 1792 had planned to transfer his remains to the Panthéon, they are, two centuries later, still resting between two other graves—those of the scholarly monks Jean Mabillon and Bernard de Montfaucon—in a chapel of the abbey. His memorial, erected in the 18th century, remains in the Swedish church.

Philosophical work

Descartes is often regarded as the first thinker to provide a philosophical framework for the natural sciences as these began to develop.

In his ''Discourse on the Method'', he attempts to arrive at a fundamental set of principles that one can know as true without any doubt. To achieve this, he employs a method called hyperbolical/metaphysical doubt, also sometimes referred to as methodological skepticism: he rejects any ideas that can be doubted, and then reestablishes them in order to acquire a firm foundation for genuine knowledge.

Initially, Descartes arrives at only a single principle: thought exists. Thought cannot be separated from me, therefore, I exist (''Discourse on the Method'' and ''Principles of Philosophy''). Most famously, this is known as ''cogito ergo sum'' (English: "I think, therefore I am"). Therefore, Descartes concluded, if he doubted, then something or someone must be doing the doubting, therefore the very fact that he doubted proved his existence. "The simple meaning of the phrase is that if one is skeptical of existence, that is in and of itself proof that he does exist."

Descartes concludes that he can be certain that he exists because he thinks. But in what form? He perceives his body through the use of the senses; however, these have previously been unreliable. So Descartes determines that the only indubitable knowledge is that he is a ''thinking thing''. Thinking is what he does, and his power must come from his essence. Descartes defines "thought" (''cogitatio'') as "what happens in me such that I am immediately conscious of it, insofar as I am conscious of it". Thinking is thus every activity of a person of which he is immediately conscious.

To further demonstrate the limitations of the senses, Descartes proceeds with what is known as the ''Wax Argument''. He considers a piece of wax; his senses inform him that it has certain characteristics, such as shape, texture, size, color, smell, and so forth. When he brings the wax towards a flame, these characteristics change completely. However, it seems that it is still the same thing: it is still the same piece of wax, even though the data of the senses inform him that all of its characteristics are different. Therefore, in order to properly grasp the nature of the wax, he should put aside the senses. He must use his mind. Descartes concludes:

In this manner, Descartes proceeds to construct a system of knowledge, discarding perception as unreliable and instead admitting only deduction as a method. In the third and fifth ''Meditation'', he offers an ontological proof of a benevolent God (through both the ontological argument and trademark argument). Because God is benevolent, he can have some faith in the account of reality his senses provide him, for God has provided him with a working mind and sensory system and does not desire to deceive him. From this supposition, however, he finally establishes the possibility of acquiring knowledge about the world based on deduction ''and'' perception. In terms of epistemology therefore, he can be said to have contributed such ideas as a rigorous conception of foundationalism and the possibility that reason is the only reliable method of attaining knowledge.

In Descartes's system, knowledge takes the form of ideas, and philosophical investigation is the contemplation of these ideas. This concept would influence subsequent internalist movements as Descartes's epistemology requires that a connection made by conscious awareness will distinguish knowledge from falsity. As a result of his Cartesian doubt, he viewed rational knowledge as being "incapable of being destroyed" and sought to construct an unshakable ground upon which all other knowledge can be based. The first item of unshakable knowledge that Descartes argues for is the aforementioned ''cogito'', or thinking thing.

Descartes also wrote a response to skepticism about the existence of the external world. He argues that sensory perceptions come to him involuntarily, and are not willed by him. They are external to his senses, and according to Descartes, this is evidence of the existence of something outside of his mind, and thus, an external world. Descartes goes on to show that the things in the external world are material by arguing that God would not deceive him as to the ideas that are being transmitted, and that God has given him the "propensity" to believe that such ideas are caused by material things.

Descartes was also known for his work in producing the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies. This can be most easily explored using the statement: "This statement is a lie." While it is most commonly referred to as a paradox, the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies states that at any given time a statement can be both true and false simultaneously because of its contradictory nature. The statement is true in its fallacy. Thus, Descartes developed the Cartesian Theory of Fallacies, which greatly influenced the thinking of the time. Many would-be philosophers were trying to develop inexplicable statements of seeming fact, however, this laid rumors of such a proposition impossible. Many philosophers believe that when Descartes formulated his Theory of Fallacies, he intended to be lying, which in and of itself embodies the theory.

Dualism

Descartes in his Passions of the Soul and The Description of the Human Body suggested that the body works like a machine, that it has the material properties of extension and motion, and that it follows the laws of nature. The mind (or soul), on the other hand, was described as a nonmaterial entity that lacks extension and motion, and does not follow the laws of nature. Descartes argued that only humans have minds, and that the mind interacts with the body at the pineal gland. This form of dualism or duality proposes that the mind controls the body, but that the body can also influence the otherwise rational mind, such as when people act out of passion. Most of the previous accounts of the relationship between mind and body had been uni-directional.

Descartes suggested that the pineal gland is "the seat of the soul" for several reasons. First, the soul is unitary, and unlike many areas of the brain the pineal gland appeared to be unitary (though subsequent microscopic inspection has revealed it is formed of two hemispheres). Second, Descartes observed that the pineal gland was located near the ventricles. He believed the cerebrospinal fluid of the ventricles acted through the nerves to control the body, and that the pineal gland influenced this process. Finally, although Descartes realized that both humans and animals have pineal glands (see ''Passions of the Soul'' Part One, Section 50, AT 369), he believed that only humans have minds. This led him to the belief that animals cannot feel pain, and Descartes's practice of vivisection (the dissection of live animals) became widely used throughout Europe until the Enlightenment. Cartesian dualism set the agenda for philosophical discussion of the mind–body problem for many years after Descartes's death.

Mathematical legacy

Descartes's theory provided the basis for the calculus of Newton and Leibniz, by applying infinitesimal calculus to the tangent line problem, thus permitting the evolution of that branch of modern mathematics. This appears even more astounding considering that the work was just intended as an ''example'' to his ''Discours de la méthode pour bien conduire sa raison, et chercher la verité dans les sciences'' (''Discourse on the Method of Rightly Conducting the Reason, and Searching for Truth in the Sciences'', better known under the shortened title ''Discours de la méthode''; English, ''Discourse on the Method'').

Descartes' rule of signs is also a commonly used method to determine the number of positive and negative roots of a polynomial.

Descartes created analytic geometry, and discovered an early form of the law of conservation of momentum (the term momentum refers to the momentum of a force). He outlined his views on the universe in his Principles of Philosophy.

Descartes also made contributions to the field of optics. He showed by using geometric construction and the law of refraction (also known as Descartes's law or more commonly Snell's law, who discovered it 16 years earlier) that the angular radius of a rainbow is 42 degrees (i.e., the angle subtended at the eye by the edge of the rainbow and the ray passing from the sun through the rainbow's centre is 42°). He also independently discovered the law of reflection, and his essay on optics was the first published mention of this law.

One of Descartes most enduring legacies was his development of Cartesian geometry, which uses algebra to describe geometry. He "invented the convention of representing unknowns in equations by ''x'', ''y'', and ''z'', and knowns by ''a'', ''b'', and ''c''". He also "pioneered the standard notation" that uses superscripts to show the powers or exponents, for example the 4 used in x⁴ to indicate squaring of squaring.

Contemporary reception

Although Descartes was well known in academic circles towards the end of his life, the teaching of his works in schools was controversial. Henri de Roy (Henricus Regius, 1598–1679), Professor of Medicine at the University of Utrecht, was condemned by the Rector of the University, Gijsbert Voet (Voetius), for teaching Descartes's physics.

Religious beliefs

The religious beliefs of René Descartes have been rigorously debated within scholarly circles. He claimed to be a devout Roman Catholic, claiming that one of the purposes of the ''Meditations'' was to defend the Christian faith. However, in his own era, Descartes was accused of harboring secret deist or atheist beliefs. Contemporary Blaise Pascal said that "I cannot forgive Descartes; in all his philosophy, Descartes did his best to dispense with God. But Descartes could not avoid prodding God to set the world in motion with a snap of his lordly fingers; after that, he had no more use for God."

Stephen Gaukroger's biography of Descartes reports that "he had a deep religious faith as a Catholic, which he retained to his dying day, along with a resolute, passionate desire to discover the truth." After Descartes died in Sweden, Queen Christina abdicated her throne to convert to Roman Catholicism (Swedish law required a Protestant ruler). The only Roman Catholic with whom she had prolonged contact was Descartes, who was her personal tutor.

Writings

1618. ''Compendium Musicae''. A treatise on music theory and the aesthetics of music written for Descartes's early collaborator Isaac Beeckman.

1626–1628. ''Regulae ad directionem ingenii'' (''Rules for the Direction of the Mind''). Incomplete. First published posthumously in 1684. The best critical edition, which includes an early Dutch translation, is edited by Giovanni Crapulli (The Hague: Martinus Nijhoff, 1966).

1630–1633. ''Le Monde'' (''The World'') and ''L'Homme'' (''Man''). Descartes's first systematic presentation of his natural philosophy. ''Man'' was published posthumously in Latin translation in 1662; and ''The World'' posthumously in 1664.

1637. ''Discours de la méthode'' (''Discourse on the Method''). An introduction to the ''Essais'', which include the ''Dioptrique'', the ''Météores'' and the ''Géométrie''.

1637. ''La Géométrie'' (''Geometry''). Descartes's major work in mathematics. There is an English translation by Michael Mahoney (New York: Dover, 1979).

1641. ''Meditationes de prima philosophia'' (''Meditations on First Philosophy''), also known as ''Metaphysical Meditations''. In Latin; a French translation, probably done without Descartes's supervision, was published in 1647. Includes six Objections and Replies. A second edition, published the following year, included an additional objection and reply, and a ''Letter to Dinet''.

1644. ''Principia philosophiae'' (''Principles of Philosophy''), a Latin textbook at first intended by Descartes to replace the Aristotelian textbooks then used in universities. A French translation, ''Principes de philosophie'' by Claude Picot, under the supervision of Descartes, appeared in 1647 with a letter-preface to Queen Christina of Sweden.

1647. ''Notae in programma'' (''Comments on a Certain Broadsheet''). A reply to Descartes's one-time disciple Henricus Regius.

1647. ''The Description of the Human Body''. Published posthumously.

1648. ''Responsiones Renati Des Cartes...'' (''Conversation with Burman''). Notes on a Q&A; session between Descartes and Frans Burman on 16 April 1648. Rediscovered in 1895 and published for the first time in 1896. An annotated bilingual edition (Latin with French translation), edited by Jean-Marie Beyssade, was published in 1981 (Paris: PUF).

1649. ''Les passions de l'âme'' (''Passions of the Soul''). Dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.

1656. ''Musicae Compendium'' (''Instruction in Music''). Posth. Publ.: Johannes Janssonius jun., Amsterdam

1657. ''Correspondence''. Published by Descartes's literary executor Claude Clerselier. The third edition, in 1667, was the most complete; Clerselier omitted, however, much of the material pertaining to mathematics.

In January 2010, a previously unknown letter from Descartes, dated 27 May 1641, was found by the Dutch philosopher Erik-Jan Bos when browsing through Google. Bos found the letter mentioned in a summary of autographs kept by Haverford College in Haverford, Pennsylvania. The College was unaware that the letter had never been published. This was the third letter by Descartes found in the last 25 years.

See also

3587 Descartes, asteroid

Analytic geometry

Balloonist theory

Baruch Spinoza

Philosophy of Spinoza

Cartesian circle

Cartesian coordinate system

Cartesian diagram

Cartesian diver

Cartesian morphism

Cartesian product

Cartesian product of graphs

Cartesian tree

Defect (geometry)

Descartes' rule of signs

Descartes' theorem

Dualistic interactionism

Folium of Descartes

Self-organization

Scientific Revolution

Solipsism

Notes

References

Collected works

1983. ''Oeuvres de Descartes'' in 11 vols. Adam, Charles, and Tannery, Paul, eds. Paris: Librairie Philosophique J. Vrin.

Collected English translations

1988. ''The Philosophical Writings Of Descartes'' in 3 vols. Cottingham, J., Stoothoff, R., Kenny, A., and Murdoch, D., trans. Cambridge University Press.

Single works

1618. ''Compendium Musicae''.

1628. ''Rules for the Direction of the Mind''.

1637. ''Discourse on the Method'' ("Discours de la Methode"). An introduction to ''Dioptrique'', ''Des Météores'' and ''La Géométrie''. Original in French, because intended for a wider public.

1637. ''La Géométrie''. Smith, David E., and Lantham, M. L., trans., 1954. ''The Geometry of René Descartes''. Dover.

1641. ''Meditations on First Philosophy''. Cottingham, J., trans., 1996. Cambridge University Press. Latin original. Alternative English title: ''Metaphysical Meditations''. Includes six ''Objections and Replies''. A second edition published the following year, includes an additional ‘’Objection and Reply’’ and a ''Letter to Dinet''. HTML Online Latin-French-English Edition

1644. ''Les Principes de la philosophie''. Miller, V. R. and R. P., trans., 1983. ''Principles of Philosophy''. Reidel.

1647. ''Comments on a Certain Broadsheet''.

1647. ''The Description of the Human Body''.

1648. ''Conversation with Burman''.

1649. ''Passions of the Soul''. Voss, S. H., trans., 1989. Indianapolis: Hackett. Dedicated to Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia.

Secondary literature

Farrell, John. “Demons of Descartes and Hobbes.” ''Paranoia and Modernity: Cervantes to Rousseau'' (Cornell UP, 2006), chapter 7.

Giuseppe Leone, [Il quarto centenario dalla nascita di Cartesio (1596)], Una "ragione" per l'Europa Unita, in "Ricorditi di me...", su Lecco 2000, Aprile 1996.

Gillespie, A. (2006). Descartes’ demon: A dialogical analysis of ‘Meditations on First Philosophy.’ Theory & Psychology, 16, 761–781.

Moreno Romo, Juan Carlos (Coord.), ''Descartes vivo. Ejercicios de hermenéutica cartesiana'', Anthropos, Barcelona, 2007''''

Moreno Romo, Juan Carlos, ''Vindicación del cartesianismo radical'', Anthropos, Barcelona, 2010.

Serfati, M., 2005, "Geometria" in Ivor Grattan-Guinness, ed., ''Landmark Writings in Western Mathematics''. Elsevier: 1–22.

External links

Video

''Bernard Williams interviewed about Descartes on "Men of ideas"''

General

Detailed biography of Descartes

Descartes featured on the 100 French Franc banknote from 1942.

More easily readable versions of ''Meditations'', ''Objections and Replies'', ''Principles of Philosophy'', ''Discourse on the Method'', Correspondence with Princess Elisabeth, and ''Passions of the Soul''.

1984 John Cottingham translation of ''Meditations'' and ''Objections and Replies''.

René Descartes (1596–1650) Published in ''Encyclopedia of Rhetoric and Composition'' (1996)

Original texts of René Descartes in French at La Philosophie

Descartes Philosophical Writings tr. by Norman Kemp Smith at archive.org

Studies in the Cartesian philosophy (1902) by Norman Kemp Smith at archive.org

The Philosophical Works Of Descartes Volume II (1934) at archive.org

René Descartes (1596—1650): Overview(IEP)

René Descartes:The Mind-Body Distinction(IEP)

Cartesian skepticism(DEP)

Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy

René Descartes

Descartes' Epistemology

Descartes' Ethics

Descartes' Life and Works

Descartes' Modal Metaphysics

Descartes' Ontological Argument

Descartes and the Pineal Gland

Descartes' Physics

Descartes' Theory of Ideas

Category:17th-century French writers Category:17th-century Latin-language writers Category:17th-century mathematicians Category:17th-century philosophers Category:Burials at the Abbey of Saint-Germain-des-Prés, Paris Category:Natural philosophers Category:Christian philosophers Category:Consciousness researchers and theorists Category:Critics of animal rights Category:Deaths from pneumonia Category:Early modern philosophers Category:French expatriates in Sweden Category:French mathematicians Category:French philosophers Category:French Roman Catholics Category:History of neuroscience Category:Humor researchers Category:Infectious disease deaths in Sweden Category:Language creators Category:Leiden University alumni Category:Roman Catholic philosophers Category:People of the Dutch Golden Age Category:Philosophers of mind Category:Philosophers of science Category:Rationalists Category:University of Poitiers alumni Category:People from Indre-et-Loire Category:1596 births Category:1650 deaths Category:Metaphysicians Category:French music theorists

af:René Descartes als:René Descartes am:ረኔ ዴካርት ar:رينيه ديكارت an:René Descartes ast:René Descartes az:Rene Dekart bn:রনে দেকার্ত zh-min-nan:René Descartes be:Рэнэ Дэкарт be-x-old:Рэнэ Дэкарт bs:René Descartes br:René Descartes bg:Рене Декарт ca:René Descartes ceb:René Descartes cs:René Descartes cy:René Descartes da:René Descartes de:René Descartes et:René Descartes el:Ρενέ Ντεκάρτ es:René Descartes eo:René Descartes ext:René Descartes eu:René Descartes fa:رنه دکارت hif:René Descartes fo:René Descartes fr:René Descartes fy:René Descartes ga:René Descartes gl:René Descartes gan:笛卡兒 ko:르네 데카르트 hy:Ռենե Դեկարտ hi:रने देकार्त hr:René Descartes io:René Descartes id:René Descartes ia:René Descartes is:René Descartes it:Cartesio he:רנה דקארט jv:René Descartes pam:René Descartes ka:რენე დეკარტი kk:Декарт Рене rw:René Descartes sw:René Descartes ht:Rene Descartes ku:René Descartes la:Renatus Cartesius lv:Renē Dekarts lb:René Descartes lt:René Descartes li:René Descartes hu:René Descartes mk:Рене Декарт ml:റെനെ ദെക്കാർത്ത് mr:रेने देकार्त arz:رينيه ديكارت ms:René Descartes mwl:René Descartes mn:Рене Декарт nah:René Descartes nl:René Descartes ja:ルネ・デカルト no:René Descartes nn:René Descartes oc:René Descartes pnb:رینے ڈیکارٹ pms:René Descartes nds:René Descartes pl:Kartezjusz pt:René Descartes ro:René Descartes qu:René Descartes rue:Рене Декарт ru:Декарт, Рене sa:रने देकार्त sco:Rene Descartes sq:René Descartes scn:Cartesiu simple:René Descartes sk:René Descartes sl:René Descartes ckb:ڕێنە دێکارت sr:Рене Декарт sh:Rene Descartes fi:René Descartes sv:René Descartes tl:Rene Descartes ta:ரெனே டேக்கார்ட் th:เรอเน เดการ์ต tr:René Descartes uk:Рене Декарт ur:رینے دیکارت vi:René Descartes fiu-vro:Descartes'i René wa:René Descartes zh-classical:笛卡兒 war:René Descartes yi:רענע דעקארט yo:René Descartes zh-yue:笛卡兒 diq:René Descartes bat-smg:René Descartes zh:勒内·笛卡儿

name	Alain de Botton
birth date	December 20, 1969
birth place	Zürich, Switzerland
occupation	writer, documentary maker
nationality	Swiss
period	1993–
influences	Seneca, Marcel Proust, Montaigne, Stendhal, Gustave Flaubert
website	http://www.alaindebotton.com/ }}

Alain de Botton (born 1969) is a Swiss writer, television presenter, and entrepreneur, resident in the UK. His books and television programs discuss various contemporary subjects and themes in a philosophical style, emphasizing philosophy's relevance to everyday life. In August 2008, he was a founding member of a new educational establishment in central London called The School of Life. In May 2009, he was a founding member of a new architectural organization called "Living Architecture". In October that year, de Botton was appointed an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in recognition of his services to architecture.

Early life

Born in 20 December 1969 in Zurich, De Botton comes from a Sephardic Jewish family, originating from a small Castilian town of Boton (now vanished) on the Iberian peninsula. He is the only son of his father, banker Gilbert de Botton who co-founded Global Asset Management with Jacob Rothschild and Mark Weinberg. Alain's father and mother, Jacqueline Burgauer, married in 1962. He has one sister Miel.

De Botton spent the first eight years of his life in Switzerland where he learned to speak French and German. He was sent to the Dragon School, a boarding school in Oxford, where he learned to speak English. Describing himself as a shy child, he subsequently boarded at Harrow School. He achieved a double starred first in history at Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge (1988–1991) and completed his master's degree in philosophy at King's College London (1991–1992). He began a PhD in French philosophy at London University, but gave up research to write books for the general public.

Writing

De Botton has written in a variety of formats to mixed response. Positive reviews of de Botton's books claim that he has made literature, philosophy and art more accessible to a wider audience.

Ambivalence is apparent in the following example,

De Botton's idea of bringing philosophy to the masses and presenting it in an nonthreatening manner (and showing how it might be useful in anyone's life), is admirable; the way he has gone about it is less so. —''The Independent''

Negative reviews allege that de Botton tends to state the obvious from a position of privilege and have characterized some of his books as pompous and lacking focus.

His books include black-and-white photographs punctuating the text.

Essays

De Botton has written books of essays in which his own experiences and ideas are interwoven with those of artists, philosophers and thinkers. These have been called a "philosophy of everyday life."

Fiction

In his first novel, ''Essays In Love'' (titled ''On Love'' in the U.S.), published in 1993, De Botton deals with the process of falling in and out of love. The style of the book is unusual because it mixes elements of a novel with reflections and analyses normally found in non-fiction. In 2010, ''Essays in Love'' was adapted to film by director Julian Kemp for the romantic comedy ''My Last Five Girlfriends''.

Non-fiction

In 1997 he published his first non-fiction book, ''How Proust Can Change Your Life'', based on the life and works of Marcel Proust. It is a mixture of a "self-help" envelope and analysis of one of the most revered but unread books in the Western canon, ''In Search of Lost Time''. It was a bestseller in the U.S. and UK.

This was followed by ''The Consolations of Philosophy'' in 2000. The title of the book is a reference to Boethius's ''Consolation of Philosophy'', in which philosophy appears as an allegorical figure to Boethius to console him in the period leading up to his impending execution. Though sometimes described as works of popularization, ''Proust'' and ''Consolations'' were attempts to develop original ideas about friendship, art, envy, desire, and inadequacy, among other things, with the help of thoughts of other thinkers. In ''The Consolations of Philosophy'', de Botton attempts to demonstrate how the teachings of philosophers such as Epicurus, Montaigne, Nietzsche, Schopenhauer, Seneca, and Socrates can be applied to modern everyday woes such as unpopularity, feelings of inadequacy, financial worries, broken hearts, and the general problem of suffering. The book has been both praised and criticized for its therapeutic approach to philosophy.

De Botton then returned to a more lyrical, personal style of writing. In ''The Art of Travel'', he looked at themes in the psychology of travel: how we imagine places before we see them, how we remember beautiful things, what happens to us when we look at deserts, stay in hotels, and go to the countryside.

In ''Status Anxiety'' (2004), de Botton examines an almost universal anxiety that is rarely mentioned directly: what others think of us; about whether we're judged a success or a failure, a winner or a loser.

In ''The Architecture of Happiness'' (2006), he discusses the nature of beauty in architecture and how it is related to the well-being and general contentment of the individual and society. He describes how architecture affects people every day, though people rarely pay particular attention to it. A good portion of the book discusses how human personality traits are reflected in architecture. He ends up defending Modernist architecture, and chastising the pseudo-vernacular architecture of housing, especially in the UK. "The best modern architecture," he argues, "doesn't hold a mirror up to nature, though it may borrow a pleasing shape or expressive line from nature's copybook. It gives voice to aspirations and suggests possibilities. The question isn't whether you'd actually like to live in a Le Corbusier home, but whether you'd like to be the kind of person who'd like to live in one."

In ''The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work'' (2009), a survey of ten different jobs, including accountancy, rocket science and biscuit manufacture, which includes two hundred original images and aims to unlock the beauty, interest and occasional horror of the modern world of work.

In response to a question about whether he felt "pulled" to be a writer, de Botton responded:

So I think where people tend to end up results from a combination of encouragement, accident, and lucky break, etc. etc. Like many others, my career happened like it did because certain doors opened and certain doors closed. You know, at a certain point I thought it would be great to make film documentaries. Well, in fact, I found that to be incredibly hard and very expensive to do and I didn’t really have the courage to keep battling away at that. In another age, I might have been an academic in a university, if the university system had been different. So it’s all about trying to find the best fit between your talents and what the world can offer at that point in time.

In August 2009, de Botton replied to a competition advertised among British literary agents by BAA, the airport management company, for the post of "writer-in-residence" at Heathrow Airport. The post involved being seated at a desk in Terminal 5, and writing about the comings and goings of passengers over a week. De Botton was duly appointed to the position. The result was the book, ''A Week at the Airport'', published by Profile Books in September 2009. The book features photographs by the documentary photographer Richard Baker, with whom de Botton also worked on ''The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work''.

Newspapers, lecturing and television

De Botton writes regular articles for several English newspapers, and from 1998 to 2000, wrote a regular column for ''The Independent on Sunday''. He also travels extensively to lecture on his works. He owns and helps run his own production company, Seneca Productions, making television documentaries based on his works.

Other projects

''The School of Life''

De Botton's project from 2008 is The School of Life – a new cultural enterprise based in central London aiming to offer instruction on how to lead a fulfilled life. In an interview with metkere.com de Botton said:

The idea is to challenge traditional universities and reorganize knowledge, directing it towards life, and away from knowledge for its own sake. In a modest way, it’s an institution that is trying to give people what universities should I think always give them: a sense of direction and wisdom for their lives with the help of culture.

''Living Architecture''

In May 2009, de Botton was named as the chief inspiration for a new architecture project called "Living Architecture" – which proposes to build a series of innovative houses in the U.K. using leading contemporary architects. These include Peter Zumthor, MVRDV, JVA, NORD and Michael and Patti Hopkins. The houses will be rented out to the general public. De Botton's aim is to improve the appreciation of good contemporary architecture – and seems a practical continuation of his theoretical work on architecture in his book ''The Architecture of Happiness''. In October 2009, de Botton was appointed an honorary fellow of the Royal Institute of British Architects, in recognition of his services to architecture.

Personal life

When his father died, his family was left a trust fund of over £200 million, although de Botton says his income is derived solely from the proceeds of his book sales. His stepmother Janet de Botton is a prominent patron of the arts and competition bridge player. De Botton lives in London with his wife Charlotte and their children.

Publications

''Essays In Love'' (1993), also published as ''On Love: A Novel'' (2006)

''The Romantic Movement'' (1994)

''Kiss and Tell'' (1995)

''How Proust Can Change Your Life'' (1997)

''The Consolations of Philosophy'' (2000)

''The Art of Travel'' (2002)

''Status Anxiety'' (2004)

''The Architecture of Happiness'' (2006)

''The Pleasures and Sorrows of Work'' (2009)

''A Week at the Airport'' (2009)

Filmography

''My Last Five Girlfriends'' (based on ''Essays in Love'')

TV series

Philosophy: A Guide To Happiness (from ''The Consolations of Philosophy'')

# ''Socrates on Self-Confidence'' # ''Epicurus on Happiness'' # ''Seneca on Anger'' # ''Montaigne on Self-Esteem'' # ''Schopenhauer on Love'' # ''Nietzsche on Hardship'' (featuring Cathal Grealish)

''Status Anxiety (film)''

''The Art Of Travel'' Prix européen de l'essai Charles Veillon

''The Perfect Home'' (from ''The Architecture of Happiness'')

References

External links

Living Architecture

Open Library. Works by de Botton

Compendium of reviews of ''The Consolations of Philosophy''

Archived web chat

Interview with 3AM Magazine (2002)

Alain de Botton interview: "The City as a Cure for Loneliness"

Alain de Botton at the Internet Movie Database

Interview with Colin Marshall

Alain de Botton at TedGlobal filmed on July 2009: A kinder, gentler philosophy of success

Audio: Alain de Botton in conversation on the BBC World Service discussion show ''The Forum''

Category:1969 births Category:Living people Category:Old Dragons Category:Old Harrovians Category:Alumni of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge Category:Alumni of King's College London Category:Harvard University alumni Category:English writers Category:English Jews Category:Jewish writers Category:Swiss Jews Category:Swiss philosophers Category:Swiss expatriates in the United Kingdom Category:20th-century Sephardi Jews Category:21st-century Sephardi Jews

ca:Alain de Botton de:Alain de Botton es:Alain de Botton fa:الن دو باتن fr:Alain de Botton ko:알랭 드 보통 it:Alain de Botton he:אלן דה בוטון nl:Alain de Botton ja:アラン・ド・ボトン no:Alain de Botton pt:Alain de Botton ro:Alain de Botton sh:Alain de Botton fi:Alain de Botton sv:Alain de Botton tr:Alain de Botton uk:Алан де Боттон zh:艾倫·迪·波頓

name	Monty Python
medium	Television, film, theatre, audio recordings, books
nationality	British
active	1969–1983
genre	Satire, Surreal humour, dark comedy
influences	The Goons, Spike Milligan, Peter Cook
influenced	Douglas Adams, Eddie Izzard, George Carlin, Vic and Bob, Matt Stone, Trey Parker
notable work	''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' (1969–1974)''And Now for Something Completely Different'' (1971)''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' (1974)''Monty Python's Life of Brian'' (1979)''Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl'' (1982)''Monty Python's The Meaning of Life'' (1983)
current members	Graham Chapman John Cleese Terry Gilliam Eric Idle Terry Jones Michael Palin
website	PythOnline
footnotes	}}

Monty Python (sometimes known as The Pythons) was a British surreal comedy group who created their influential ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'', a British television comedy sketch show that first aired on the BBC on 5 October 1969. Forty-five episodes were made over four series. The Python phenomenon developed from the television series into something larger in scope and impact, spawning touring stage shows, films, numerous albums, several books and a stage musical as well as launching the members to individual stardom. The group's influence on comedy has been compared to Elvis Presley's influence on music.

The television series, broadcast by the BBC from 1969 to 1974, was conceived, written and performed by members Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin. Loosely structured as a sketch show, but with an innovative stream-of-consciousness approach (aided by Gilliam's animation), it pushed the boundaries of what was acceptable in style and content. A self-contained comedy team responsible for both writing and performing their work, they changed the way performers entertained audiences. The Pythons' creative control allowed them to experiment with form and content, discarding rules of television comedy. Their influence on British comedy has been apparent for years, while in North America it has coloured the work of cult performers from the early editions of ''Saturday Night Live'' through to more recent absurdist trends in television comedy. "Pythonesque" has entered the English lexicon as a result.

In a 2005 UK poll to find ''The Comedian's Comedian'', three of the six Pythons members were voted by fellow comedians and comedy insiders to be among the top 50 greatest comedians ever: Cleese at #2, Idle at #21, and Palin at #30.

Before ''Flying Circus''

Palin and Jones met at Oxford University, where they performed together with the Oxford Revue. Cleese and Chapman met at Cambridge. Idle was also at Cambridge, but started a year after Cleese and Chapman. Cleese met Gilliam in New York while on tour with the Cambridge University Footlights revue ''Cambridge Circus'' (originally entitled ''A Clump of Plinths''). Chapman, Cleese and Idle were members of the Footlights, which at that time also included the future ''Goodies'' (Tim Brooke-Taylor, Bill Oddie and Graeme Garden), and Jonathan Lynn (co-writer of ''Yes Minister'' and ''Yes, Prime Minister''). During Idle's presidency of the Club, feminist writer Germaine Greer and broadcaster Clive James were members. Recordings of Footlights revues (called "Smokers") at Pembroke College include sketches and performances by Idle and Cleese. They are kept in the archives of the Pembroke Players, along with tapes of Idle's performances in some of the college drama society's theatrical productions.

Python members appeared in and/or wrote the following shows before ''Monty Python's Flying Circus''. ''The Frost Report'' is credited as first uniting the British Pythons and providing an environment in which they could develop their particular styles:

''I'm Sorry, I'll Read That Again'' (radio) (1964–1973) [Cleese: cast member & writer] – [Idle and Chapman: writers]

''The Frost Report'' (1966–1967) [Cleese: cast member and writer] – [Idle: writer of Frost's monologues] – [Chapman, Palin and Jones: writers]

''At Last the 1948 Show'' (1967) [Chapman and Cleese: writers and cast members] – [Idle: writer]

''Twice a Fortnight'' (1967) [Palin and Jones: cast members and writers]

''Do Not Adjust Your Set'' (1967–1969) [Idle, Jones, and Palin: cast members & writers] – [Gilliam: animation] — Bonzo Dog Band: musical interludes]

''We Have Ways of Making You Laugh'' (1968) [Idle: cast member & writer] – [Gilliam: animation]

''How to Irritate People'' (1968) [Cleese and Chapman: cast members & writers] – [Palin: cast member]

''The Complete and Utter History of Britain'' (1969) [Palin and Jones: cast members & writers]

''Doctor in the House'' (1969) [Cleese & Chapman: writers]

Several featured other important British comedy writers or performers of the future, including Marty Feldman, Jonathan Lynn, David Jason and David Frost, as well as members of other future comedy teams, Ronnie Corbett and Ronnie Barker (the Two Ronnies), and Tim Brooke-Taylor, Graeme Garden and Bill Oddie (the Goodies).

Following the success of ''Do Not Adjust Your Set'', originally intended to be a children's programme, with adults, ITV offered Palin, Jones, Idle and Gilliam their own series together. At the same time Cleese and Chapman were offered a show by the BBC, which had been impressed by their work on ''The Frost Report'' and ''At Last The 1948 Show''. Cleese was reluctant to do a two-man show for various reasons, including Chapman's supposedly difficult personality. Cleese had fond memories of working with Palin and invited him to join the team. With the ITV series still in pre-production, Palin agreed and suggested the involvement of his writing partner Jones and colleague Idle—who in turn suggested that Gilliam could provide animations for the projected series. Much has been made of the fact that the Monty Python troupe is the result of Cleese's desire to work with Palin and the chance circumstances that brought the other four members into the fold.

''Monty Python's Flying Circus''

Development of the series

The Pythons had a definite idea about what they wanted to do with the series. They were admirers of the work of Peter Cook, Alan Bennett, Jonathan Miller and Dudley Moore on ''Beyond the Fringe'', and had worked on ''Frost'', which was similar in style. They enjoyed Cook and Moore's sketch show ''Not Only... But Also''. One problem the Pythons perceived with these programmes was that though the body of the sketch would be strong, the writers would often struggle to then find a punchline funny enough to end on, and this would detract from the overall sketch quality. They decided that they would simply not bother to "cap" their sketches in the traditional manner, and early episodes of the Flying Circus series make great play of this abandonment of the punchline (one scene has Cleese turn to Idle, as the sketch descends into chaos, and remark that "This is the silliest sketch I've ever been in"—they all resolve not to carry on and simply walk off the set). However, as they began assembling material for the show, the Pythons watched one of their collective heroes, Spike Milligan, recording his groundbreaking series ''Q5'' (1969). Not only was the programme more irreverent and anarchic than any previous television comedy, Milligan would often "give up" on sketches halfway through and wander off set (often muttering "Did I write this?"). It was clear that their new series would now seem less original, and Jones in particular became determined the Pythons should innovate.

After much debate, Jones remembered an animation Gilliam had created for ''Do Not Adjust Your Set'' called ''Beware of the Elephants'', which had intrigued him with its stream-of-consciousness style. Jones felt it would be a good concept to apply to the series: allowing sketches to blend into one another. Palin had been equally fascinated by another of Gilliam's efforts, entitled ''Christmas Cards'', and agreed that it represented "a way of doing things differently". Since Cleese, Chapman and Idle were less concerned with the overall flow of the programme, it was Jones, Palin and Gilliam who became largely responsible for the presentation style of the ''Flying Circus'' series, in which disparate sketches are linked to give each episode the appearance of a single stream-of-consciousness (often using a Gilliam animation to move from the closing image of one sketch to the opening scene of another).

Writing started at 9 am and finished at 5 pm. Typically, Cleese and Chapman worked as one pair isolated from the others, as did Jones and Palin, while Idle wrote alone. After a few days, they would join together with Gilliam, critique their scripts, and exchange ideas. Their approach to writing was democratic. If the majority found an idea humorous, it was included in the show. The casting of roles for the sketches was a similarly unselfish process, since each member viewed himself primarily as a 'writer', rather than an actor desperate for screen time. When the themes for sketches were chosen, Gilliam had carte blanche to decide how to bridge them with animations, using a camera, scissors, and airbrush.

While the show was a collaborative process, different factions within Python were responsible for elements of the team's humour. In general, the work of the Oxford-educated members was more visual, and more fanciful conceptually (e.g., the arrival of the Spanish Inquisition in a suburban front room), while the Cambridge graduates' sketches tended to be more verbal and more aggressive (for example, Cleese and Chapman's many "confrontation" sketches, where one character intimidates or hurls abuse, or Idle's characters with bizarre verbal quirks, such as The Man Who Speaks In Anagrams). Cleese confirmed that "most of the sketches with heavy abuse were Graham's and mine, anything that started with a slow pan across countryside and impressive music was Mike and Terry's, and anything that got utterly involved with words and disappeared up any personal orifice was Eric's". Gilliam's animations, meanwhile, ranged from the whimsical to the savage (the cartoon format allowing him to create some astonishingly violent scenes without fear of censorship).

Several names for the show were considered before ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' was settled upon. Some were ''Owl Stretching Time'', ''Toad Elevating Moment'', ''A Bucket, a Horse and a Spoon'', ''Vaseline Review'' and ''Bun, Wackett, Buzzard, Stubble and Boot''. ''Flying Circus'' stuck when the BBC explained it had printed that name in its schedules and was not prepared to amend it. Many variations on the name in front of this title then came and went (popular legend holds that the BBC considered ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' to be a ridiculous name, at which point the group threatened to change their name every week until the BBC relented). "Gwen Dibley's Flying Circus" was named after a woman Palin had read about in the newspaper, thinking it would be amusing if she were to discover she had her own TV show. "Baron Von Took's Flying Circus" was considered as an affectionate tribute to Barry Took, the man who had brought them together. ''Arthur Megapode's Flying Circus'' was suggested, then discarded.

There are differing, somewhat confusing accounts of the origins of the Python name although the members agree that its only "significance" was that they thought it sounded funny. In the 1998 documentary ''Live At Aspen'' during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where the troupe was awarded the AFI Star Award by the American Film Institute, the group implied that "Monty" was selected (Eric Idle's idea) as a gently-mocking tribute to Field Marshal Lord Montgomery, a legendary British general of World War II; requiring a "slippery-sounding" surname, they settled on "Python". On other occasions Idle has claimed that the name "Monty" was that of a popular and rotund fellow who drank in his local pub; people would often walk in and ask the barman, "Has Monty been in yet?", forcing the name to become stuck in his mind. The name Monty Python was later described by the BBC as being "envisaged by the team as the perfect name for a sleazy entertainment agent".

Style of the show

''Flying Circus'' popularised innovative formal techniques, such as the cold open, in which an episode began without the traditional opening titles or announcements. An example of this is the "It's" man: Palin, outfitted in Robinson Crusoe garb, making a tortuous journey across various terrains, before finally approaching the camera to state, "It's...", only to be then cut off by the title sequence and theme music. On several occasions the cold open lasted until mid show, after which the regular opening titles ran. Occasionally the Pythons tricked viewers by rolling the closing credits halfway through the show, usually continuing the joke by fading to the familiar globe logo used for BBC continuity, over which Cleese would parody the clipped tones of a BBC announcer. On one occasion the credits ran directly after the opening titles. They also experimented with ending segments by cutting abruptly to another scene or animation, walking offstage, addressing the camera (breaking the fourth wall), or introducing a totally unrelated event or character. A classic example of this approach was the use of Chapman's "Colonel" character, who walked into several sketches and ordered them to be stopped because things were becoming "far too silly." Another favourite way of ending sketches was to drop a cartoonish "16-ton weight" prop on one of the characters when the sketch seemed to be losing momentum, or a knight in full armour (played by Terry Gilliam) would wander on-set and hit characters over the head with a rubber chicken, before cutting to the next scene. Yet another way of changing scenes was when John Cleese, usually outfitted in a dinner suit, would come in as a radio commentator and make the formal and determined announcement, "And now for something completely different."

The Python theme music is ''The Liberty Bell'', a march by John Philip Sousa, which was chosen, among other reasons, because the recording was in the public domain.

The use of Gilliam's surreal, collage stop motion animations was another innovative intertextual element of the Python style. Many of the images Gilliam used were lifted from famous works of art, and from Victorian illustrations and engravings. The giant foot which crushes the show's title at the end of the opening credits is in fact the foot of Cupid, cut from a reproduction of the Renaissance masterpiece ''Venus, Cupid, Folly, and Time'' by Bronzino. This foot, and Gilliam's style in general, are visual trademarks of the series.

The Pythons used the British tradition of cross-dressing comedy by donning frocks and makeup and playing female roles themselves while speaking in falsetto. Generally speaking, female roles were played by a woman (usually Carol Cleveland) when the scene specifically required that the character be sexually attractive (although sometimes they used Idle for this). In some episodes and later in ''Monty Python's Life of Brian'' they took the idea one step further by playing women who impersonated men (in the stoning scene).

Many sketches are well-known and widely quoted. "Dead Parrot", "The Lumberjack Song", "Spam", "Nudge Nudge", "The Spanish Inquisition", "Upper Class Twit of the Year", "Cheese Shop" and "The Ministry of Silly Walks" are just a few examples.

End of ''Flying Circus''

Having considered the possibility at the end of the second series, Cleese left the ''Flying Circus'' at the end of the third. He later explained that he felt he no longer had anything fresh to offer the show, and claimed that only two Cleese-and-Chapman-penned sketches in the third series ("Dennis Moore" and the "Cheese Shop") were truly original, and that the others were bits and pieces from previous work cobbled together in slightly different contexts. He was also finding Chapman, who was at that point in the full throes of alcoholism, difficult to work with. According to an interview with Idle, "It was on an Air Canada flight on the way to Toronto, when John (Cleese) turned to all of us and said 'I want out.' Why? I don't know. He gets bored more easily than the rest of us. He's a difficult man, not easy to be friendly with. He's so funny because he never wanted to be liked. That gives him a certain fascinating, arrogant freedom."

The rest of the group carried on for one more "half" series before calling a halt to the programme in 1974. The name ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' appears in the opening animation for series four, but in the end credits the show is listed as simply "Monty Python". Despite his official departure from the group, Cleese supposedly made a (non-speaking) cameo appearance in the fourth series, but never appeared in the credits as a performer. Several episodes credit him as a co-writer since some sketches were recycled from scenes cut from the ''Holy Grail'' script. While the first three series contained 13 episodes each, the fourth ended after six.

Time-Life Films had the right to distribute all BBC-TV programs in America, however they had decided that British comedy simply would not work in the U.S.A. Therefore, it was not worth the investment to convert the Python shows from the European PAL standard to the American NTSC standard, which meant PBS stations could not afford the programmes. Finally, in 1974, Greg Garrison, TV producer for Dean Martin, used a couple of Python sketches ("Bicycle Repairman" and "The Dull Life of a Stockbroker") on the NBC series ''ComedyWorld'', a summer replacement series for ''The Dean Martin Show''. Payment for use of these segments was enough to pay for the conversion of the entire Python library to NTSC standard. At last, they could be sold to non-commercial TV stations, where officially they began airing in October 1974—exactly 5 years after their BBC debut. One PBS station had a program director (Ron Devillier) so eager that he 'jumped the gun' and started broadcasting the 'Flying Circus' episodes in that summer on the unlikely KERA in Dallas. The ratings shot through the roof—and was an encouraging sign to the other 100 stations that had signed up to air the shows. There was also cross-promotion from FM radio stations across the country, whose airing of tracks from the Python LPs had already introduced American audiences to this bizarre brand of comedy.

With the popularity of Python throughout the rest of the 1970s and through most of the 1980s, PBS stations looked at other British comedies, leading to UK shows such as ''Are You Being Served?'' gaining a US audience, and leading, over time, to many PBS stations having a "British Comedy Night" which airs many popular UK comedies.

Life after the ''Flying Circus''

Filmography

''And Now for Something Completely Different'' (1971)

The Pythons' first feature film (directed by Ian MacNaughton, reprising his role from the television series). It was composed of sketches from the first two seasons of the ''Flying Circus'', reshot on a low budget (and often slightly edited) for cinema release. Material selected for the film includes: "Dead Parrot", "The Lumberjack Song", "Upper Class Twit of the Year", "Hell's Grannies", "Self-Defence Class", "How Not To Be Seen" and "Nudge Nudge". Financed by Playboy's UK executive Victor Lownes, it was intended as a way of breaking Monty Python into America, and although it was ultimately unsuccessful in this, the film did good business in the UK (this still being in the era before home video would make it much more accessible to view the material again). The group did not consider the film a success.

''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' (1974)

In 1974, between production on the third and fourth seasons, the group decided to embark on their first "proper" feature film, containing entirely new material. ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' was based on Arthurian Legend and was directed by Jones and Gilliam. Again, the latter also contributed linking animations (and put together the opening credits). Along with the rest of the Pythons, Jones and Gilliam performed several roles in the film, but it was Chapman who took the lead as King Arthur. Cleese returned to the group for the film, feeling that the group were once again breaking new ground. ''Holy Grail'' was filmed on location, in picturesque rural areas of Scotland, with a budget of only £229,000; the money was raised in part with investments from rock groups such as Pink Floyd, Jethro Tull and Led Zeppelin—and UK music industry entrepreneur Tony Stratton-Smith (founder and owner of the Charisma Records label, for which the Pythons recorded their comedy albums).

The backers of the film wanted to cut the famous Black Knight scene (in which the Black Knight loses his limbs in a duel) but it was eventually kept in the movie.

''Monty Python's Life of Brian'' (1979)

Following the success of ''Holy Grail'', reporters asked for the title of the next Python film, despite the fact that the team had not even begun to consider a third one. Eventually, Idle once flippantly replied "Jesus Christ – Lust for Glory", which became the group's stock answer once they realised that it shut reporters up. However, they soon began to seriously consider a film lampooning the New Testament era in the same way ''Holy Grail'' had lampooned Arthurian legend. Despite them all sharing a distrust of organised religion, they agreed not to mock Jesus nor his teachings directly. Instead, they decided to write a satire on credulity and hypocrisy among the followers of someone who had been mistaken for the "Messiah," but who had no desire to be followed as such. Chapman was cast in the lead role of Brian.

The focus therefore shifted to a separate individual born at the same time, in a neighbouring stable. When Jesus appears in the film (first, as a baby in the stable, and then later on the Mount, speaking the Beatitudes), he is played straight (by actor Kenneth Colley) and portrayed with respect. The comedy begins when members of the crowd mishear his statements of peace, love and tolerance. ("I think he said, 'Blessed are the cheesemakers.'")

Directing duties were handled solely by Jones, having amicably agreed with Gilliam that Jones' approach to film-making was better suited for Python's general performing style. ''Holy Grail's'' production had often been stilted by their differences behind the camera. Gilliam again contributed two animated sequences (one being the opening credits) and took charge of set design. The film was shot on location in Tunisia, the finances being provided this time by former Beatle George Harrison, who together with Denis O'Brien formed the production company Hand-Made Films for the movie. He had a cameo role as the 'owner of the Mount.'

Despite its subject matter attracting controversy, particularly upon its initial release, it has (together with its predecessor) been ranked among the greatest comedy films. A Channel 4 poll in 2005 ranked ''Holy Grail'' in sixth place, with ''Life of Brian'' at the top.

''Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl'' (1982)

Filmed at the Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles during preparations for ''The Meaning of Life'', this was a concert film (directed by Terry Hughes) in which the Pythons performed sketches from the television series in front of an audience. The released film also incorporated footage from the German television specials (the inclusion of which gives Ian MacNaughton his first on-screen credit for Python since the end of ''Flying Circus'') and live performances of several songs from the troupe's then-current ''Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album''.

''Monty Python's The Meaning of Life'' (1983)

Python's final film returned to something structurally closer to the style of ''Flying Circus''. A series of sketches loosely follows the ages of man from birth to death. Directed again by Jones solo, ''The Meaning of Life'' is embellished with some of Python's most bizarre and disturbing moments, as well as various elaborate musical numbers. The film is by far their darkest work, containing a great deal of black humour, garnished by some spectacular violence (including an operation to remove a liver from a living patient without anaesthetic and the morbidly obese Mr. Creosote exploding over several restaurant patrons). At the time of its release, the Pythons confessed their aim was to offend "absolutely everyone."

Besides the opening credits and the fish sequence, Gilliam, by now an established live action director, no longer wanted to produce any linking cartoons, offering instead to direct one sketch—''The Crimson Permanent Assurance''. Under his helm, though, the segment grew so ambitious and tangential that it was cut from the movie and used as a supporting feature in its own right. (Television screenings also use it as a prologue.) Crucially, this was the last project that all six Pythons would collaborate on, except for the 1989 compilation ''Parrot Sketch Not Included,'' where they are all seen sitting in a closet for four seconds. This would be the last time Chapman appeared on-screen with the Pythons.

''Secret Policeman's Ball'' benefit shows

Members of Python contributed their services to charitable endeavours and causes—sometimes as an ensemble, at other times as individuals. The cause that has been the most frequent and consistent beneficiary has been the human rights work of Amnesty International. Between 1976 and 1981, the troupe or its members appeared in four major fund-raisers for Amnesty—known collectively as the ''Secret Policeman's Ball'' shows—which were turned into multiple films, TV shows, videos, record albums and books. These benefit shows and their many spin-offs raised considerable sums of money for Amnesty, raised public and media awareness of the human rights cause and influenced many other members of the entertainment community (especially rock musicians) to become involved in political and social issues. Among the many musicians who have publicly attributed their activism—and the organisation of their own benefit events—to the inspiration of the work in this field of Monty Python are U2, Bob Geldof, Pete Townshend and Sting. The shows are credited by Amnesty with helping the organisation develop public awareness in the USA where one of the spin-off films was a major success.

Cleese and Jones had an involvement (as performer, writer or director) in all four Amnesty benefit shows, Palin in three, Chapman in two and Gilliam in one. Idle did not participate in the Amnesty shows. Notwithstanding Idle's lack of participation, the other five members (together with "Associate Pythons" Carol Cleveland and Neil Innes) all appeared together in the first ''Secret Policeman's Ball'' benefit—the 1976 ''A Poke In The Eye (With A Sharp Stick)''—where they performed several Python sketches. In this first show they were collectively billed as ''Monty Python''. (Peter Cook deputised for the errant Idle in one major sketch ''The Courtroom''.) In the next three shows, the participating Python members performed many Python sketches, but were billed under their individual names rather than under the collective Python banner. After a six-year break, Amnesty resumed producing ''Secret Policeman's Ball'' benefit shows in 1987 (sometimes with, and sometimes without variants of the iconic title) and by 2006 had presented a total of twelve such shows. The shows since 1987 have featured newer generations of British comedic performers, including many who have attributed their participation in the show to their desire to emulate the Python's pioneering work for Amnesty. (Cleese and Palin made a brief cameo appearance in the 1989 Amnesty show; apart from that the Pythons have not appeared in shows after the first four.)

Going solo

Each member has pursued various film, television and stage projects since the break-up of the group, but often continued to work with one another. Many of these collaborations were very successful, most notably ''A Fish Called Wanda'' (1988), written by Cleese, in which he starred along with Palin. The pair also appeared in ''Time Bandits'' (1981), a film directed by Gilliam, who wrote it together with Palin. Gilliam directed ''Jabberwocky'' (1977), and also directed and co-wrote ''Brazil'' (1985) and ''The Adventures of Baron Munchausen'' (1988), which featured Palin and Idle respectively. ''Yellowbeard'' (1983) was co-written by Chapman and featured Chapman, Cleese and Palin alongside many of their English contemporaries, including Peter Cook, Spike Milligan and Marty Feldman.

Palin and Jones wrote the comedic TV series ''Ripping Yarns'' (1976–79), starring Palin. Jones also appeared in the pilot episode and Cleese appeared in a non-speaking part in the episode "Golden Gordon". Jones' film ''Erik the Viking'', also has Cleese playing a small part.

In 1996, Terry Jones wrote and directed an adaption of Kenneth Grahame's novel ''The Wind in the Willows''. It featured four members of Monty Python: Jones as Mr. Toad, Idle as Ratty, Cleese as Mr. Toad's lawyer, and Palin as the Sun. Gilliam was considered for the voice of the river.

In terms of numbers of productions, Cleese has the most prolific solo career, having appeared in 59 theatrical films, 22 TV shows or series (including ''Cheers'', ''3rd Rock from the Sun'', Q's assistant in the James Bond movies, and ''Will & Grace''), 23 direct-to-video productions, six video games, and a number of commercials. His BBC sitcom ''Fawlty Towers'' (written by and starring Cleese together with his then-wife Connie Booth), is considered the greatest solo work by a Python since the sketch show finished. It is the only comedy series to rank higher than the ''Flying Circus'' on the BFI TV 100's list, topping the whole poll.

Idle enjoyed critical success with ''Rutland Weekend Television'' in the mid-1970s, out of which came the Beatles parody The Rutles (responsible for the cult mockumentary ''All You Need Is Cash''), and as an actor in ''Nuns on the Run'' (1990) with Robbie Coltrane. Idle has had success with Python songs: "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" went to no. 3 in the UK singles chart in 1991. The song had been revived by Simon Mayo on BBC Radio 1, and was consequently released as a single that year. The theatrical phenomenon of the Python musical ''Spamalot'' has made Idle the most financially successful of the troupe post-Python. Written by Idle, it has proved an enormous hit on Broadway, London's West End and also Las Vegas. This was followed by ''Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy)'', which repurposes ''The Life of Brian'' as an oratorio. For the work's 2007 premiere at the Luminato festival in Toronto (which commissioned the work), Idle himself sang the "baritone-ish" part.

Post-Python reunions

Since ''The Meaning of Life'', their last project as a team, the Pythons have often been the subject of reunion rumours. The final reunion of all six members occurred during the ''Parrot Sketch Not Included – 20 Years of Monty Python'' special. The death of Chapman in 1989 (on the eve of their 20th anniversary) put an end to the speculation of any further reunions. There have been several occasions since 1989 when the surviving five members have gathered together for appearances—albeit not formal reunions.

In 1996, Jones, Idle, Cleese and Palin were featured in a film adaptation of ''The Wind in the Willows'', which was later renamed ''Mr. Toad's Wild Ride''.

In 1998 during the US Comedy Arts Festival, where the troupe was awarded the AFI Star Award by the American Film Institute, the five remaining members along with what was purported to be Chapman's ashes, were reunited on stage for the first time in 18 years. The occasion was in the form of an interview called Monty Python Live At Aspen, (hosted by Robert Klein, with an appearance by Eddie Izzard) in which the team looked back at some of their work and performed a few new sketches.

On 9 October 1999, to commemorate 30 years since the first ''Flying Circus'' television broadcast, BBC2 devoted an evening to Python programmes, including a documentary charting the history of the team, interspersed with new sketches by the Monty Python team filmed especially for the event. The program appears, though omitting a few things, on the DVD ''The Life of Python''. Though Idle's involvement in the special is limited, the final sketch marks the only time since 1989 that all surviving members of the troupe appear in one sketch, albeit not in the same room.

In 2002, four of the surviving members, bar Cleese, performed "The Lumberjack Song" and "Sit on My Face" for George Harrison's memorial concert. The reunion also included regular supporting contributors Neil Innes and Carol Cleveland, with a special appearance from Tom Hanks.

In an interview to publicise the DVD release of ''The Meaning of Life,'' Cleese said a further reunion was unlikely. "It is absolutely impossible to get even a majority of us together in a room, and I'm not joking," Cleese said. He said that the problem was one of business rather than one of bad feelings. A sketch appears on the same DVD spoofing the impossibility of a full reunion, bringing the members “together” in a deliberately unconvincing fashion with modern bluescreen/greenscreen techniques.

Idle has responded to queries about a Python reunion by adapting a line used by George Harrison in response to queries about a possible Beatles reunion. When asked in November 1989 about such a possibility, Harrison responded: "As far as I'm concerned, there won't be a Beatles reunion as long as John Lennon remains dead." Idle's version of this was that he expected to see a proper Python reunion, "just as soon as Graham Chapman comes back from the dead", but added, "we're talking to his agent about terms."

2003's ''The Pythons Autobiography By The Pythons'', compiled from interviews with the surviving members, reveals that a series of disputes in 1998, over a possible sequel to ''Holy Grail'' that had been conceived by Idle, may have resulted in the group's permanent fission. Cleese's feeling was that ''The Meaning of Life'' had been personally difficult and ultimately mediocre, and did not wish to be involved in another Python project for a variety of reasons (not least amongst them was the absence of Chapman, whose straight man-like central roles in the original ''Grail'' and ''Brian'' films had been considered to be essential performance anchorage). Apparently Idle was angry with Cleese for refusing to do the film, which most of the remaining Pythons thought reasonably promising (the basic plot would have taken on a self-referential tone, featuring them in their main 'knight' guises from ''Holy Grail'', mulling over the possibilities of reforming their posse). The book also reveals that a secondary option around this point was the possibility of revitalising the Python brand with a new stage tour, perhaps with the promise of new material. This idea had also hit the buffers at Cleese's refusal, this time with the backing of other members.

March 2005 saw a full, if non-performing, reunion of the surviving cast members at the premiere of Idle's musical ''Spamalot'', based on ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail''. It opened in Chicago and has since played in New York on Broadway, London and numerous other major cities across the world. In 2004, it was nominated for 14 Tony Awards and won three: Best Musical, Best Direction of a Musical for Mike Nichols and Best Performance by a Featured Actress in a Musical for Sara Ramirez, who played the Lady of the Lake, a character specially added for the musical. Cleese played the voice of God, played in the film by Chapman.

Owing in part to the success of ''Spamalot'', PBS announced on 13 July 2005, that it would begin to re-air the entire run of ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' and new one-hour specials focusing on each member of the group, called ''Monty Python's Personal Best.'' Each episode was written and produced by the individual being honoured, with the five remaining Pythons collaborating on Chapman's programme, the only one of the editions to take on a serious tone with its new material.

Eric Idle and John Cleese appeared on stage together singing "Always Look on the Bright Side of Life" with the rest of the performers for the climax of Prince Charles 60th Birthday Show.

In 2009, to commemorate the fortieth anniversary of the first episode of ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'', a six part documentary entitled ''Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut)'' was released, featuring interviews with the surviving members of the team as well as archive interviews with Graham Chapman and numerous excerpts from the television series and films.

Also in commemoration of the 40th anniversary Idle, Palin, Jones and Gilliam appeared in a production of ''Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy)'' at the Royal Albert Hall. The European premiere was held on 23 October 2009. An official 40th anniversary Monty Python reunion event took place in New York City on 15 October 2009 where the Team received a Special Award from the British Academy of Film and Television Arts.

In June 2011, it was announced that Monty Python have begun production on their first film project since ''the Meaning of Life'' in 1983. Their next film, ''A Liar's Autobiography'', is an animated 3D movie based on the memoir of the late Python member, Graham Chapman, who died in 1989 at the age of 48. ''A Liar’s Autobiography'' was published in 1980 and details Chapman's journey through medical school, alcoholism, acknowledgement of his gay identity and the toils of surreal comedy.

Asked what was true in a deliberately fanciful account by Chapman of his life, Terry Jones joked: "Nothing . . . it’s all a downright, absolute, blackguardly lie."

The film will use Chapman's own voice - from a reading of his autobiography shortly before he died of cancer - and entertainment channel EPIX announced that the film will be released in early 2012 in both 2D and 3D formats. Produced and directed by London-based Bill Jones, Ben Timlett and Jeff Simpson, the new film has 15 animation companies working on chapters that will range from three to 12 minutes in length, each in a different style.

John Cleese has recorded new dialogue which will be matched with Chapman’s voice and Michael Palin will voice Chapman’s mother and father. Terry Gilliam plays various roles. Among the original Python group, only Eric Idle has not become involved, though Timlett said the filmmakers are “working on” him.

Python members

Graham Chapman was originally a medical student, joining the Footlights at Cambridge. He completed his medical training and was legally entitled to practice as a doctor. Chapman is best remembered for the lead roles in ''Holy Grail'', as King Arthur, and ''Life of Brian'', as Brian Cohen. He died of spinal and throat cancer on 4 October 1989. At Chapman's memorial service, Cleese delivered an irreverent eulogy that included all the euphemisms for being dead from the Dead Parrot sketch, which they had written.

John Cleese is the oldest Python. He met his future Python writing partner, Graham Chapman in Cambridge.

Terry Gilliam, an American, was the only member of the troupe of non-British origin. He started off as an animator and strip cartoonist for Harvey Kurtzman's ''Help!'' magazine, one issue of which featured Cleese. Moving from the USA to England, he animated features for ''Do Not Adjust Your Set'' and was then asked by its makers to join them on their next project: ''Monty Python's Flying Circus''. He co-directed ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' and directed short segments of other Python films (for instance "The Crimson Permanent Assurance", the short film that appears before ''The Meaning of Life'').

When Monty Python was first formed, two writing partnerships were already in place: Cleese and Chapman, Jones and Palin. That left two in their own corners: Gilliam, operating solo due to the nature of his work, and Eric Idle. Regular themes in his contributions were elaborate wordplay and musical numbers. After ''Flying Circus'', he hosted ''Saturday Night Live'' four times in the first five seasons. Idle's initially successful solo career faltered in the 1990s with the failures of his 1993 film ''Splitting Heirs'' (written, produced by and starring him) and 1998's ''An Alan Smithee Film: Burn Hollywood Burn'' (in which he starred), which was awarded five Razzies, including 'Worst Picture of the Year'. He revived his career by returning to the source of his worldwide fame, adapting Monty Python material for other media. He also wrote the Broadway musical ''Spamalot'', based on the ''Holy Grail'' movie. He also wrote ''Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy)'', an oratorio derived from the ''Life of Brian''.

Terry Jones has been described by other members of the team as the “heart” of the operation. Jones had a lead role in maintaining the group's unity and creative independence. Python biographer George Perry has commented that should you "speak to him on subjects as diverse as fossil fuels, or Rupert Bear, or mercenaries in the Middle Ages or Modern China... in a moment you will find yourself hopelessly out of your depth, floored by his knowledge." Many others agree that Jones is characterised by his irrepressible, good-natured enthusiasm. However, Jones' passion often led to prolonged arguments with other group members—in particular Cleese—with Jones often unwilling to back down. Since his major contributions were largely behind the scenes (direction, writing), and he often deferred to the other members of the group as an actor, Jones' importance to Python was often underrated. However, he does have the legacy of delivering possibly the most famous line in all of Python, as Brian's mother Mandy in ''Life of Brian'', "He's not the Messiah, he's a very naughty boy!", a line voted the funniest in film history on two occasions.

Michael Palin attended Oxford, where he met his Python writing partner Jones. The two also wrote the series ''Ripping Yarns'' together. Palin and Jones originally wrote face-to-face, but soon found it was more productive to write apart and then come together to review what the other had written. Therefore, Jones and Palin's sketches tended to be more focused than that of the others, taking one bizarre situation, sticking to it, and building on it. After ''Flying Circus'', he hosted ''Saturday Night Live'' four times in the first ten seasons. His comedy output began to decrease in amount following the increasing success of his travel documentaries for the BBC. Palin released a book of diaries from the Python years entitled ''Michael Palin Diaries 1969–1979'', published in 2007.

Associate Pythons

Several people have been accorded unofficial "Associate Python" status over the years. Occasionally such people have been referred to as the ''7th Python'', in a style reminiscent of associates of The Beatles being dubbed "the Fifth Beatle." The two collaborators with the most meaningful and plentiful contributions have been Neil Innes and Carol Cleveland. Both were present and presented as ''Associate Pythons'' at the official Monty Python 25th anniversary celebrations held in Los Angeles in July 1994. Neil Innes is the only non-Python besides Douglas Adams to be credited with writing material for the ''Flying Circus''. He appeared in sketches and the Python films, as well as performing some of his songs in ''Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl''. He was also a regular stand-in for absent team members on the rare occasions when they re-created sketches. For example, he took the place of Cleese at the Concert for George. Gilliam once noted that if anyone qualified for the title of the "Seventh Python," it would certainly be Innes. He was one of the creative talents in the off-beat Bonzo Dog Band. He would later portray Ron Nasty of the Rutles and write all of the Rutles' compositions for ''All You Need is Cash'' (1978). By 2005, a falling out had occurred between Idle and Innes over additional Rutles projects, the results being Innes' critically acclaimed Rutles "reunion" album ''The Rutles: Archaeology'' and Idle's straight-to-DVD ''The Rutles 2: Can't Buy Me Lunch'', each undertaken without the other's participation. According to an interview with Idle in the ''Chicago Tribune'' in May 2005, his attitude is that he and Innes go back "too far. And no further." Innes has remained silent on the dispute.

Carol Cleveland was the most important female performer in the Monty Python ensemble, commonly referred to as the "Python Girl." Originally hired by producer/director John Howard Davies for just the first five episodes of the ''Flying Circus'', she went on to appear in approximately two-thirds of the episodes as well as in all of the Python films, and in most of their stage shows as well. Her common portrayal as the stereotypical "blonde bimbo" eventually earned her the sobriquet "Carol Cleavage" from the other Pythons, but she felt that the variety of her roles should not be described in such a pejorative way.

Other contributors

Cleese's wife Connie Booth appeared in, amongst others "The Lumberjack Song" and as the "witch" in ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail''. Cleese and Booth later co-wrote and co-starred in ''Fawlty Towers''.

Douglas Adams was "discovered" by Chapman when a version of the ''Footlights Revue'' (a 1974 BBC2 television show featuring some of Adams' early work) was performed live in London's West End. In Cleese's absence from the final TV series, the two formed a brief writing partnership, with Adams earning a writing credit in one episode for a sketch called "Patient Abuse". In the sketch, a man who had been stabbed by a nurse arrives at his doctor's office bleeding profusely from the stomach, when the doctor makes him fill out numerous senseless forms before he can administer treatment. He also had two cameo appearances in this season. Firstly, in the episode ''The Light Entertainment War'', Adams shows up in a surgeon's mask (as Dr. Emile Koning, according to the on-screen captions), pulling on gloves, while Palin narrates a sketch that introduces one person after another, and never actually gets started. Secondly, at the beginning of ''Mr. Neutron'', Adams is dressed in a "pepperpot" outfit and loads a missile onto a cart being driven by Terry Jones, who is calling out for scrap metal ("Any old iron..."). Adams and Chapman also subsequently attempted a few non-Python projects, including ''Out of the Trees.'' He also contributed to a sketch on the soundtrack album for ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail''.

Stand-up comedian Eddie Izzard, a devoted fan of the group, has occasionally stood in for absent members. When the BBC held a "Python Night" in 1999 to celebrate 30 years of the first broadcast of ''Flying Circus'', the Pythons recorded some new material with Izzard standing in for Idle, who had declined to partake in person (he taped a solo contribution from the US). Izzard hosted a history of the group entitled ''The Life of Python'' (1999) that was part of the ''Python Night'' and appeared with them at a festival/tribute in Aspen, Colorado, in 1998 (released on DVD as ''Live at Aspen'').

Cultural influence

By the time of the twenty-fifth anniversary of Monty Python in 1994, the point was already being made that "the five surviving members had with the passing years begun to occupy an institutional position in the edifice of British social culture that they had once had so much fun trying to demolish". A similar point is made in a 2006 book on the relationship between Monty and philosophy: "It is remarkable, after all, not only that the utterly bizarre ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' was sponsored by the BBC in the first place, but that Monty Python itself grew into an institution of enormous cultural influence" Matt Groening, creator and co-developer of animated series the Simpsons, names Monty Python as an influence and pays tribute through a couch gag used in seasons five and six.

Space

In 2010 the commercial space company SpaceX, launched a wheel of cheese into low earth orbit and returned it safely to the earth. Elon Musk, CEO and CTO of SpaceX, claimed this was done as a tribute to Monty Python.

World records

On St George's Day, 23 April 2007, the cast and creators of Spamalot gathered in Trafalgar Square under the tutelage of the two Terrys (Jones and Gilliam) to set a new record for the world's largest coconut orchestra. They led 5,567 people "clip-clopping" in time to the Python classic "Always Look On The Bright Side of Life" for the Guinness World Records attempt.

'Pythonesque'

Amongst the more visible cultural influences of Monty Python is the inclusion of terms either directly from, or derived from, Monty Python, into the lexicon of the English language. The most obvious of these is the term 'pythonesque', which has become a byword in surreal humour, and is included in standard dictionaries. Terry Jones commented on his disappointment at the existence of such a term, claiming the initial aim of Monty Python was to create something new and impossible to categorize and that "the fact that Pythonesque is now a word in the Oxford English Dictionary shows the extent to which we failed".

The term has been applied to animations similar to those constructed by Gilliam (e.g. the cut-out style of ''South Park'', whose creators have often acknowledged a debt to Python, including contributing material to the aforementioned 30th anniversary theme night).

''Good Eats'' creator Alton Brown cited Python as one of the influences that shaped how he created the series, as well as how he authors the script for each episode. Recent episodes even include Gilliam-style animations to illustrate key points.

Things named after Monty Python

Beyond a dictionary definition, Python terms have entered the lexicon in other ways.

The Python programming language by Guido van Rossum is named after the troupe, and Monty Python references are often found in sample code created for that language. Additionally, a 2001 April Fool's Day joke by van Rossum and Larry Wall involving the merger of Python with Perl was dubbed "Parrot" after the Dead Parrot Sketch. The name "Parrot" was later used for a project to develop a virtual machine for running bytecode for interpreted languages such as Perl and Python. Also, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory wrote some spacecraft navigation software in Python, which they dubbed "Monty". There is also a python refactoring tool called bicyclerepair ( ), named after Bicycle Repair Man sketch.

In 1985, a fossil of a previously unknown species of gigantic prehistoric snake from the Miocene was discovered in Riversleigh, Queensland, Australia. The Australian palaeontologist who discovered the fossil snake was a Monty Python fan, and he gave the snake the taxonomic name of ''Montypythonoides riversleighensis'' in honour of the Monty Python team. (Transliterated from Greek Μοντυπυθωνοειδής back to English, Montypythonoides means "like Monty Python".) In 2006, Ben & Jerry's, known for their "celebrity flavours", introduced to the lineup "Vermonty Python", a coffee liqueur ice cream with a chocolate cookie crumb swirl and fudge cows. The name "Minty Python" had been suggested before in 1996 in a contest to select the quintessential British ice cream flavor. In 1999, Black Sheep Brewery released an ale named "Monty Python's Holy Grail Ale."

The band Toad the Wet Sprocket drew its name from the Eric Idle monologue "Rock Notes" on Monty Python's ''Contractual Obligation Album'' from 1980.

The band Boxhamsters, which is the German translation of Brook-Hamster, the winner of the Upper Class Twit of the Year. A philosophy lecture series entitled ''Themes in Contemporary Analytic Philosophy as Reflected in the Work of Monty Python''. The term "spam" in reference to bulk, unsolicited email is derived from the programme's 1970 "Spam" sketch.

In the book ''The Reptile Room'' by "Lemony Snicket", the character Uncle Monty was named after Monty Python, in a joke referring to his obsession with snakes.

Seven asteroids are named after Monty Python: 9617 Grahamchapman, 9618 Johncleese, 9619 Terrygilliam, 9620 Ericidle, 9621 Michaelpalin, 9622 Terryjones, and 13681 Monty Python .

The endangered Bemaraha woolly lemur (Avahi cleesei) is named after John Cleese.

''Dead Parrot Society'' is the title of a comedy CD released in 1993 featuring sketches from ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' as well as Graham Chapman, Peter Cook, John Cleese, Dudley Moore, and The Portsmouth Sinfonia The title is also a play on the 1989 film ''Dead Poets Society''.

Media

Television

''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' (1969–74)

:The show that started the Python phenomenon. See also List of Monty Python's Flying Circus episodes

''Monty Python's Fliegender Zirkus'' (1972)

: Two 45-minute specials made by WDR for West German television. The first was recorded in German, while the second was in English with German dubbing.

''Monty Python's Personal Best'' (2006)

:Six one-hour specials, each episode presenting the best of one member's work.

Films

There were five Monty Python productions released as theatrical films:

''And Now for Something Completely Different'' (1971)

:A collection of sketches from the first and second TV series of ''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' purposely re-enacted and shot for film.

''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' (1974)

:King Arthur and his knights embark on a low-budget search for the Holy Grail, encountering humorous obstacles along the way. Some of these turned into standalone sketches.

''Monty Python's Life of Brian'' (1979)

:Brian is born on the first Christmas, in the stable next to Jesus'. He spends his life being mistaken for a messiah.

''Monty Python Live at the Hollywood Bowl'' (1982)

:A videotape recording directed by Ian MacNaughton of a live performance of sketches. Originally intended for a TV/video special. Transferred to 35mm and given a limited theatrical release in the US.

''Monty Python's The Meaning of Life'' (1983)

:An examination of the meaning of life in a series of sketches from conception to death and beyond.

''Monty Python: Almost the Truth (The Lawyer's Cut)'' (2009)

:This film features interviews with all the surviving Python members, along with archive representation for the late Graham Chapman.

''A Liar's Autobiography: Volume IV'' (2012)

:This is an animated film which is based on the memoir of the late Monty Python member, Graham Chapman.

Albums

''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' (1970)

''Another Monty Python Record'' (1971)

''Monty Python's Previous Record'' (1972)

''The Monty Python Matching Tie and Handkerchief'' (1973)

''Monty Python Live at Drury Lane'' (1974)

''The Album of the Soundtrack of the Trailer of the Film of Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' (1975)

''Monty Python Live at City Center'' (1976)

''The Monty Python Instant Record Collection'' (1977)

''Monty Python's Life of Brian'' (1979)

''Monty Python's Contractual Obligation Album'' (1980)

''Monty Python's The Meaning of Life'' (1983)

''The Final Rip Off'' (1988)

''Monty Python Sings'' (1989)

''The Monty Python Instant Record Collection, Volume 2'' (1991)

''The Ultimate Monty Python Rip Off'' (1994)

''The Instant Monty Python CD Collection'' (1994)

''Spamalot'' (Broadway version of ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail'' with Tim Curry as King Arthur) (2005)

''The Hastily Cobbled Together for a Fast Buck Album'' (unreleased)

Theatre

''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' – Between 1974 and 1980 (Live at the Hollywood Bowl was released in 1982, but was performed in 1980) the Pythons made three sketch-based stage shows, comprising mainly material from the original television series.

''Monty Python's Spamalot'' – Written by Idle directed by Mike Nichols, with music and lyrics by John Du Prez and Idle, and starring Hank Azaria, Tim Curry, and David Hyde Pierce, ''Spamalot'' is a musical adaptation of the film ''Monty Python and the Holy Grail''. It ran in Chicago from 21 December 2004 to 23 January 2005, and began performances on Broadway on 17 March 2005. It won three Tonys.

''Not the Messiah (He's a Very Naughty Boy)'' – The Toronto Symphony Orchestra commissioned Idle and John Du Prez to write the music and lyrics of an oratorio based on ''Monty Python's Life of Brian''. Entitled ''Not the Messiah'', it had its world premiere as part of Luminato, a "festival of arts and creativity" taking place 1–10 June 2007 in Toronto. ''Not the Messiah'' was conducted by Peter Oundjian, Music Director of the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, who is Idle’s cousin. It was performed by a narrator, the Toronto Symphony Orchestra, with guest soloists and choir. According to Idle, "It will be funnier than Handel, though not as good".

Books

''Monty Python's Big Red Book'' (1971) ISBN 0-413-29520-6.

''The Brand New Monty Python Bok'' (1973) ISBN 0-7493-1170-3.

''Monty Python and The Holy Grail (book) – Mønti Pythøn ik den Hølie Gräilen (Bøk)'' (1977) ISBN 0-413-38520-5.

''MONTYPYTHONSCRAPBOOK/ The Life of Brian'' (1979) ISBN 0-413-46550-0.

''Monty Python's Flying Circus – Just The Words'' Volume 1 (1989) ISBN 0-413-62540-0.

''Monty Python's Flying Circus – Just The Words'' Volume 2 (1989) ISBN 0-413-62550-8.

''The Complete Monty Python's Flying Circus'' Volumes 1 & 2

''The Fairly Incomplete & Rather Badly Illustrated Monty Python Song Book'' (1994) ISBN 0-413-69000-8

''Michael Palin Diaries 1969–1979''

''The Pythons: Autobiography by the Pythons''

''The Life of Brian/Jesus'' (2011) ISBN 978-184876-628-0.

Games

''Monty Python's Flying Circus'' (1990) a computer game released by Virgin Games for 8-bit systems such as the Commodore 64, Amstrad CPC and the Sinclair ZX Spectrum

''Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time'' (1994) released by 7th Level for PC / DOS

''Monty Python & the Quest for the Holy Grail'' (1996), official game released by 7th Level. It used footage and imagery from the film, as well as audio clips (some new) and featured an animated version of a scene never filmed entitled "King Brian The Wild".

''Monty Python's The Meaning of Life'' (1997), also released by 7th Level. According to the jewel case description, it's based on the film by the same name, but it's really something completely similar yet entirely different.

''Python-opoly'' (2007), a Monty Python-themed property game released by Toy Vault Inc. ''Monty Python Fluxx'' (2008), a card game released by Looney Labs

''Blazing Dragons''

See also

Beyond the Fringe

List of Monty Python's Flying Circus episodes

List of recurring characters in Monty Python's Flying Circus

Monty Python's Complete Waste of Time

Python (Monty) Pictures

Spamalot

The Goodies

The Goon Show

References

Further reading

The Secret Policeman's Balls, 3-DVD set (2009)

Monty Python: 40 Years of Insanity

The Life of Python – 20 Greatest Monty Python Sketches (40th Anniversary)

External links

Pythonline.com – Monty Python's sort-of official site, actively maintained by Eric Idle

Monty Python – Official YouTube page

Monty Python Videos – Monty Python's best videos and movies

Python at ifilm.com

Pythonisms: Python quotes as figures of speech

The SOTCAA Monty Python Pages

Release of the 3-DVD Secret Policeman's Balls

40 Years of Monty Python – photo essay by ''TIME'' magazine

Monty Python Reunion event, New York, 15 October 2009

Category:British comedy troupes Category:British television comedy Category:Virgin Records artists Category:Arista Records artists Category:European Film Awards winners (people) Category:Charisma Records artists

bg:Монти Пайтън ca:Monty Python cs:Monty Python da:Monty Python de:Monty Python el:Μόντυ Πάιθον es:Monty Python eo:Monty Python eu:Monty Python fa:مونتی پایتون fr:Monty Python ko:몬티 파이튼 hr:Monty Python id:Monty Python ia:Monty Python is:Monty Python it:Monty Python he:מונטי פייתון ka:მონტი პაითონი la:Pytho Montium lv:Monty Python lt:Monty Python hu:Monty Python mk:Монти Пајтон nl:Monty Python ja:モンティ・パイソン no:Monty Python nn:Monty Python nds:Monty Python pl:Monty Python pt:Monty Python ro:Monty Python ru:Монти Пайтон sq:Monty Python simple:Monty Python sk:Monty Python sr:Монти Пајтон sh:Monty Python fi:Monty Python sv:Monty Python tr:Monty Python uk:Монті Пайтон zh:蒙提·派森