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- Absolute idealism
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Belo Horizonte
Belo Horizonte (Portuguese pronunciation: [ˌbɛloɾiˈzõtʃi],Beautiful Horizon) is the capital and largest city in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, located in the southeastern region of the country. It is the third largest metropolitan area in the country. Belo Horizonte (also known as "Belô", "Beagá", or "BH") has a population of 2,475,440 inhabitants (2010) in the city and 5,497,922 people in the official Metropolitan Area (2010).
The region was first settled in the early 18th century, but the city as it is known today was planned and constructed in the 1890s, in order to replace Ouro Preto as the capital of Minas Gerais. The city features a mixture of contemporary and classical buildings, and is home to several modern Brazilian architectural icons, most notably the Pampulha Complex. In planning the city, Aarão Reis and Francisco Bicalho sought inspiration in the urban planning of Washington, D.C. The city has employed notable programs in urban revitalization and food security, for which it has been awarded international accolades.
wn.com/Belo_Horizonte -
East Prussia
East Prussia (German: Ostpreußen, pronounced [ˈɔstˌpʁɔʏsən] (
listen); Polish: Prusy Wschodnie; Lithuanian: Rytų Prūsija or Rytprūsiai; Russian: Восточная Пруссия or Vostochnaya Prussiya; Latin: Borussia orientalis) was the main part of the region of Prussia along the southeastern Baltic Coast from the 13th century to the end of World War II in May 1945. From 1772–1829 and 1878–1945, the Province of East Prussia was part of the German state of Prussia. The capital city was Königsberg.
East Prussia enclosed the bulk of the ancestral lands of the Baltic Old Prussians. During the 13th century, the native Prussians were conquered by the crusading Teutonic Knights. The indigenous Balts who survived the conquest were gradually converted to Christianity. Because of Germanization and colonisation over the following centuries, Germans became the dominant ethnic group, while Poles and Lithuanians formed minorities. From the 13th century, East Prussia was part of the monastic state of the Teutonic Knights, which became the Duchy of Prussia in 1525. The Old Prussian language had become extinct by the 17th or early 18th century.
wn.com/East_Prussia -
Kaliningrad
Kaliningrad (Russian: Калинингра́д; Polish: Królewiec; Lithuanian: Karaliaučius; German: Königsberg; Czech: Královec) is a seaport city and the administrative center of Kaliningrad Oblast, the Russian exclave between Poland and Lithuania on the Baltic Sea. The territory, the northern part of the former East Prussia, borders on NATO and EU members Poland and Lithuania, and is geographically separated from the rest of Russia.
Originally named Königsberg in German, the town was founded in 1255 by the order of the Teutonic Knights in honour of the Czech king Přemysl Otakar II and was part of Prussia and then of Germany until 1945, but was largely destroyed during World War II. Its ruins were occupied by the Red Army in 1945 and its German population forced out. It was renamed Kaliningrad in 1946 in honor of Mikhail Kalinin.
According to the preliminary results of the 2010 Census, its population was 431,491—an increase from 430,003 recorded in the 2002 Census. Its ethnic composition is 77.9% Russians, 8.0% Belarusians, 7.3% Ukrainians, 1.9% Lithuanians, 0.6% Germans, and 0.5% Poles.
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Kaliningrad Oblast
Kaliningrad Oblast (Russian: Калинингра́дская о́бласть, Kaliningradskaya oblast) is a federal subject of Russia (an oblast) situated on the Baltic coast. It has a population of 941,873 (2010 Census).
The oblast forms the westernmost part of Russia, but it has no land connection to the rest of the country. Since its creation it has been an exclave of the Russian SFSR and then of the Russian Federation. The fall of the Soviet Union left it isolated from the "mainland". It is surrounded by Lithuania, Poland, and the Baltic Sea. Borderless travel to the main part of Russia is only possible by sea or air. This political isolation became more pronounced when Lithuania and Poland both became members of the European Union and NATO, and entered the Schengen Zone, which means that the oblast is surrounded by the territories of these organizations as well.
The oblast's largest city and the administrative center is Kaliningrad (formerly known as Königsberg), which has historical significance as both a major city of the historical state of Prussia and the capital of the former German province of East Prussia, partitioned after World War II between the USSR and Poland, and renamed after the Soviet Head of State Mikhail Kalinin.
wn.com/Kaliningrad_Oblast -
Klaipėda
Klaipėda (pronounced [ˈklaɪpeːda] ( listen); German: Memel) is a city in Lithuania situated at the mouth of the Danė River where it flows into the Baltic Sea. It is the third largest city in Lithuania and the capital of Klaipėda County.
The city has a complex recorded history, partially due to the combined regional importance of the Port of Klaipėda, a usually ice-free port on the Baltic Sea, and the Akmena - Danė River. It has been controlled by the Teutonic Knights, the Duchy of Prussia, the Kingdom of Prussia, the German Empire, the Entente States immediately after World War I, Lithuania as a result of the 1923 Klaipėda Revolt, and the Third Reich following the 1939 German ultimatum to Lithuania. The city was incorporated into Lithuania during its tenure as a Soviet Socialist Republic and has remained within Lithuania following its re-establishment as an independent state.
The population shrank from 207,100 in 1992 to 177,823 in 2011. Popular seaside resorts found close to Klaipėda are Nida to the south on the Curonian Spit, and Palanga to the north.
wn.com/Klaipėda -
Königsberg
Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945, and the easternmost large German city until it was conquered by the Soviet Union near the end of World War II. In 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad.
Historically, the official name was Königsberg in Preußen (abbreviated Königsberg i. Pr. (until 1936) and later Königsberg (Pr) (1936–1946)), Königsberg in Prussia, German pronunciation [ˈkʰøˑnɪçsbɛɐk],
pronunciation (help·info)). Königsberg's literal meaning is 'King's Mountain'. Historically, several regional names were used for Königsberg. Its Latinised form was Regimontium Prussorum. In Modern Saxon or "Low German", a Germanic language spoken by many of its German inhabitants, the name was Königsbarg (local pronunciation: /ˈkʰeˑnɪçsbɒɐç/), mixing German König (nds. köning) with Low German barg (hill, mountain). Further names include Lithuanian: Karaliaučius; Polish: Królewiec and the modern Russian and current official name Калинингра́д, Kaliningrad).
Königsberg was founded in 1255 on the site of the ancient Old Prussian settlement Twangste by the Teutonic Knights during the Northern Crusades, and was named in honour of King Ottokar II of Bohemia. The city successively became the capital of their monastic state, the Duchy of Prussia, and East Prussia. The Baltic port developed into a German cultural center, being the residence of, among others, Simon Dach, Immanuel Kant, Käthe Kollwitz, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and David Hilbert, Agnes Miegel and Michael Wieck.
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Königsberg Castle
The Königsberg Castle (German: Königsberger Schloss, Russian: Кёнигсбергский замок), Lithuanian: Karaliaučiaus pilis) was a castle in Königsberg, Germany (since 1946 Kaliningrad, Russia), and was one of the landmarks of the East Prussian capital Königsberg.
At the beginning of the first century AD, the Germanic tribe of the Goths erected Tuwangste Fortress near the Pregel River at an important waypoint in mostly Prussian Baltic territory. It was alternatively known as Twangste, Tvangeste, Twongst, Twoyngst. The name of this fortress was derived from the Gothic word "wangus" and describes cutting down trees in an acorn forest.[citation needed] As the oak was a symbol of Perkūns, the God of Thunder, it was held in high regard, forbidding even native Baltic Old Prussians to touch the trees.
After conquest of the area by the Teutonic Knights in 1255, the fortress at Kneiphof in Königsberg was renamed and a new Ordensburg castle was developed in 1257. The castle was greatly enlarged and refortified in several stages during the 16th to 18th centuries.
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Königsberg Cathedral
Königsberg Cathedral (German: Königsberger Dom; Russian: Кафедральный собор Кёнигсберга) is a Brick Gothic style church in Kaliningrad (formerly Königsberg) on an island in the Pregel (Pregolya). The island was called Kneiphof in German times. Königsberg was the capital of East Prussia from the Late Middle Ages until 1945, and the easternmost large German city until it was conquered by the Soviet Union near the end of World War II. In 1946 the city was renamed Kaliningrad.
The cathedral was built to replace a smaller cathedral, after Johann Clare, bishop of Sambia, insisted on the construction of a bigger building. The smaller cathedral, situated in Altstadt, was subsequently demolished and materials from it were used to build the new cathedral on Kneiphof.
The construction of the cathedral on Kneiphof is considered to have begun in 1333. The soil on which the cathedral was built was marshy, and so hundreds of oak poles were put into the ground before the construction of the cathedral could begin. After the relatively short period of almost 50 years, the cathedral was largely completed by 1380. Work on the interior frescoes lasted until the end of 14th century.
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Lithuania
Lithuania (
i/ˌlɪθuːˈeɪniə/ or /ˌlɪθjuːˈeɪniə/; Lithuanian: Lietuva), officially the Republic of Lithuania (Lithuanian: Lietuvos Respublika) is a country in Northern Europe, the largest of the three Baltic states. It is situated along the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea, whereby to the west lie Sweden and Denmark. It borders Latvia to the north, Belarus to the east and south, Poland to the south, and a Russian exclave (Kaliningrad Oblast) to the southwest. Lithuania has an estimated population of 3.2 million as of 2011, and its capital and largest city is Vilnius. The Lithuanians are a Baltic people, and the official language, Lithuanian, is one of only two living languages (together with Latvian) in the Baltic branch of the Indo-European language family.
For centuries, the southeastern shore of the Baltic Sea was inhabited by various Baltic tribes. In the 1230s the Lithuanian lands were united by Mindaugas, who was crowned as King of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania, the first Lithuanian state, on 6 July 1253. During the 14th century, the Grand Duchy of Lithuania was the largest country in Europe: present-day Belarus, Ukraine, and parts of Poland and Russia were territories of the Grand Duchy of Lithuania. With the Lublin Union of 1569, Lithuania and Poland formed a voluntary two-state union, the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. The Commonwealth lasted more than two centuries, until neighboring countries systematically dismantled it from 1772 to 1795, with the Russian Empire annexing most of Lithuania's territory.
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Russia
Russiai/ˈrʌʃə/ or /ˈrʊʃə/ (Russian: Россия, tr. Rossiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijə] ( listen)), also officially known as the Russian Federation (Russian: Российская Федерация, tr. Rossiyskaya Federatsiya; IPA: [rɐˈsʲijskəjə fʲɪdʲɪˈratsɨjə] ( listen)), is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects. From northwest to southeast, Russia shares borders with Norway, Finland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland (both via Kaliningrad Oblast), Belarus, Ukraine, Georgia, Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan, China, Mongolia, and North Korea. It also has maritime borders with Japan by the Sea of Okhotsk, and the US state of Alaska by the Bering Strait. At 17,075,400 square kilometres (6,592,800 sq mi), Russia is the largest country in the world, covering more than one eighth of the Earth's inhabited land area. Russia is also the eighth most populous nation with 143 million people. It extends across the whole of northern Asia and 40% of Europe, spanning nine time zones and incorporating a wide range of environments and landforms. Russia has the world's largest reserves of mineral and energy resources and is the largest producer of oil and natural gas globally. Russia has the world's largest forest reserves and its lakes contain approximately one-quarter of the world's fresh water.
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Scotland
Scotland (Scottish Gaelic: Alba ([ˈalˠ̪apə] listen (help·info))) is a country that is part of the United Kingdom. Occupying the northern third of the island of Great Britain, it shares a border with England to the south and is bounded by the North Sea to the east, the Atlantic Ocean to the north and west, and the North Channel and Irish Sea to the southwest. In addition to the mainland, Scotland constitutes over 790 islands including the Northern Isles and the Hebrides.
Edinburgh, the country's capital and second largest city, is one of Europe's largest financial centres. Edinburgh was the hub of the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century, which transformed Scotland into one of the commercial, intellectual and industrial powerhouses of Europe. Glasgow, Scotland's largest city, was once one of the world's leading industrial cities and now lies at the centre of the Greater Glasgow conurbation. Scottish waters consist of a large sector of the North Atlantic and the North Sea, containing the largest oil reserves in the European Union. This has given Aberdeen, the third largest city in Scotland, the title of Europe's oil capital.
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Adam Ferguson
Adam Ferguson FRSE, also known as Ferguson of Raith (20 June 1723 (O.S.) (1 July, N.S.) - 22 February 1816) was a Scottish philosopher and historian of the Scottish Enlightenment. Ferguson was sympathetic to traditional societies, such as the Highlands, for producing courage and loyalty. He criticized commercial society as making men weak, dishonourable and unconcerned for their community. Ferguson has been called "the father of modern sociology."
Born at Logierait in Atholl, Perthshire, Scotland, he received his education at Logierait Parish School, Perth Grammar School, and at the University of Edinburgh and the University of St Andrews (MA 1742). In 1745, owing to his knowledge of Gaelic, he gained appointment as deputy chaplain of the 43rd (afterwards the 42nd) regiment (the Black Watch), the licence to preach being granted him by special dispensation, although he had not completed the required six years of theological study.
It remains a matter of debate as to whether, at the Battle of Fontenoy (1745), Ferguson fought in the ranks throughout the day, and refused to leave the field, though ordered to do so by his colonel. Nevertheless, he certainly did well, becoming principal chaplain in 1746. He continued attached to the regiment till 1754, when, disappointed at not obtaining a living, he left the clergy and resolved to devote himself to literary pursuits.
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Adam Smith
Adam Smith (baptised 16 June 1723 – 17 July 1790 [OS: 5 June 1723 – 17 July 1790]) was a Scottish social philosopher and a pioneer of political economy. One of the key figures of the Scottish Enlightenment, Smith is the author of The Principles Which Lead and Direct Philosophical Enquiries, Illustrated by the History of Astronomy, prior to 1758, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, 1759, and An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, 1776. The latter, usually abbreviated as The Wealth of Nations, is considered his magnum opus and the first modern work of economics. It earned him an enormous reputation and would become one of the most influential works ever published. Smith is widely cited as the father of modern economics and capitalism and is still among the most influential thinkers in the field of economics today. In 2009, Smith was named among the 'Greatest Scots' of all time, in a vote run by Scottish television channel STV.
Smith studied social philosophy at the University of Glasgow and at Balliol College in the University of Oxford, where he was one of the first students to benefit from scholarships set up by his fellow Glaswegian John Snell. After graduating, he delivered a successful series of public lectures at Edinburgh, leading him to collaborate with David Hume during the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith obtained a professorship at Glasgow teaching moral philosophy, and during this time he wrote and published The Theory of Moral Sentiments. In his later life, he took a tutoring position that allowed him to travel throughout Europe, where he met other intellectual leaders of his day. Smith then returned home and spent the next ten years writing The Wealth of Nations, publishing it in 1776. He died in 1790 at the age of 67.
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Adolf Reinach
Adolf Bernhard Philipp Reinach (23 December 1883, Mainz, Germany – 16 November 1917, Diksmuide, Belgium), German philosopher, phenomenologist (from the Munich phenomenology perspective) and law theorist.
Adolf Reinach studied at the Ostergymnasium in Mainz (where he became at first interested in Plato) and later entered the University of Munich in 1901 where he studied mainly psychology and philosophy under Theodor Lipps. In the circle of Lipps' students he came in contact with Moritz Geiger, Otto Selz, Aloys Fischer and above all Johannes Daubert. From onward 1903/4 he was increasingly busy with the works of Edmund Husserl, especially his Logische Untersuchungen (Logical Investigations).
In 1904 Reinach obtained his doctorate in philosophy under Lipps with his work Über den Ursachenbegriff im geltenden Strafrecht (On the concept of cause in penal law). By 1905 he still intended to continue his studies in Munich (where in the meanwhile he had also befriended Alexander Pfänder), to obtain a degree in law, but then decided to go to study with Husserl in Göttingen. In that period more students of Lipps (captained by Daubert) had decided to abandon Munich and to head for Göttingen, inspired by Husserl's works (which is referred to as the Munich invasion of Göttingen).
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Adolph Stöhr
Adolph Stöhr (Sankt Pölten, 1855–1921) was professor of philosophy at the University of Vienna. His lectures and publications covered subjects such as logic, metaphysics, philosophy of language, experimental psychology, psychology of perception, and psychology of association.
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African Spir
Afrikan Aleksandrovich Špir (Russian: Африка́н Алекса́ндрович Спир; Ukrainian: Африка́н Олекса́ндрович Спір or Шпір, transcribed: Afrykan Oleksandrovych Spir or Shpir; German: Afrikan (von) Spir, French: African (de) Spir, Italian: Africano Spir) (Spirowska, 10 November 1837 – Geneva, 26 March 1890) was a Russian Neo-Kantian philosopher of German descent who wrote primarily in German. His book Denken und Wirklichkeit (Thought and Reality) exerted a "lasting impact" on the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche.
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Alain Badiou
Alain Badiou (French pronunciation: [alɛ̃ badju] (listen) (help·info); born 17 January 1937 in Rabat, Morocco) is a French philosopher, professor at European Graduate School, formerly chair of Philosophy at the École Normale Supérieure (ENS).
Badiou has written about the concepts of being, truth and the subject in a way that, he claims, is neither postmodern nor simply a repetition of modernity. Politically, Badiou is committed to the far left, and to the communist tradition.
Slavoj Žižek has written of Badiou that he is "a figure like Plato or Hegel walk[ing] here among us".
Badiou was a student at the Lycée Louis-Le-Grand and then the Ecole Normale Supérieure (1957–1961). He taught at the lycée in Reims from 1963 where he became a close friend of fellow playwright (and philosopher) François Regnault, and published a couple of novels before moving to the University of Paris VIII (Vincennes-Saint Denis) in 1969. Badiou was politically active very early on, and was one of the founding members of the Unified Socialist Party (PSU). The PSU was particularly active in the struggle for the decolonization of Algeria. He wrote his first novel, Almagestes, in 1964. In 1967 he joined a study group organized by Louis Althusser, became increasingly influenced by Jacques Lacan and became a member of the editorial board of Cahiers pour l’Analyse. By then he "already had a solid grounding in mathematics and logic (along with Lacanian theory)", and his own two contributions to the pages of Cahiers "anticipate many of the distinctive concerns of his later philosophy".
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Alasdair MacIntyre
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre (born 1929) is a Scottishphilosopher primarily known for his contribution to moral and political philosophy but known also for his work in history of philosophy and theology. He is Senior Research Fellow at the Centre for Contemporary Aristotelian Studies in Ethics and Politics (CASEP) at London Metropolitan University, and an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame.
Alasdair Chalmers MacIntyre was born 12 January 1929 in Glasgow, to John and Emily (Chalmers) MacIntyre. He was educated at Queen Mary College, London, and has a Master of Arts from the University of Manchester and from the University of Oxford. He began his teaching career in 1951 at Manchester University. He taught at the University of Leeds, the University of Essex and the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom, before moving to the USA in around 1969. MacIntyre has been something of an intellectual nomad, having taught at many universities in the US. He has held the following positions:
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Albert Camus
Albert Camus (French pronunciation: [albɛʁ kamy] ( listen); 7 November 1913 – 4 January 1960) was a French author, journalist, and philosopher. His views contributed to the rise of the philosophy known as absurdism. He wrote in his essay "The Rebel" that his whole life was devoted to opposing the philosophy of nihilism while still delving deeply into individual freedom.
Although often cited as a proponent of existentialism, the philosophy with which Camus was associated during his own lifetime, he rejected this particular label. In an interview in 1945, Camus rejected any ideological associations: "No, I am not an existentialist. Sartre and I are always surprised to see our names linked..."
In 1949, Camus founded the Group for International Liaisons within the Revolutionary Union Movement, which was opposed to some tendencies of the Surrealist movement of André Breton.
Camus was awarded the 1957 Nobel Prize for Literature "for his important literary production, which with clear-sighted earnestness illuminates the problems of the human conscience in our times". He was the second-youngest recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, after Rudyard Kipling, and the first African-born writer to receive the award. He is the shortest-lived of any Nobel literature laureate to date, having died in an automobile accident just over two years after receiving the award.
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Albert Einstein
Albert Einstein ( /ˈælbərt ˈaɪnstaɪn/; German: [ˈalbɐt ˈaɪnʃtaɪn] ( listen); 14 March 1879 – 18 April 1955) was a German theoretical physicist who developed the theory of general relativity, effecting a revolution in physics. For this achievement, Einstein is often regarded as the father of modern physics. While best known for his mass–energy equivalence formula E = mc2 (which has been dubbed "the world's most famous equation"), he received the 1921 Nobel Prize in Physics "for his services to theoretical physics, and especially for his discovery of the law of the photoelectric effect". The latter was pivotal in establishing quantum theory within physics.
Near the beginning of his career, Einstein thought that Newtonian mechanics was no longer enough to reconcile the laws of classical mechanics with the laws of the electromagnetic field. This led to the development of his special theory of relativity. He realized, however, that the principle of relativity could also be extended to gravitational fields, and with his subsequent theory of gravitation in 1916, he published a paper on the general theory of relativity. He continued to deal with problems of statistical mechanics and quantum theory, which led to his explanations of particle theory and the motion of molecules. He also investigated the thermal properties of light which laid the foundation of the photon theory of light. In 1917, Einstein applied the general theory of relativity to model the structure of the universe as a whole.
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Albrecht Ritschl
Albrecht Ritschl (March 25, 1822 – March 20, 1889) was a German theologian.
Starting in 1852, Ritschl lectured on "Systematic Theology". According to this system, faith was understood to be irreducible to other experiences, beyond the scope of reason. Faith, he said, came not from facts but from value judgments. Jesus' divinity, he argued, was best understood as expressing "revelational-value" of Christ for the community that trusts him as God. He held the Christ's message to be committed to a community.
Ritschl was born in Berlin. His father, Georg Karl Benjamin Ritschl (1783–1858), became in 1810 a pastor at the church of St Mary in Berlin, and from 1827 to 1854 was general superintendent and evangelical bishop of Pomerania. Albrecht Ritschl studied at Bonn, Halle, Heidelberg and Tübingen. At Halle he came under Hegelian influences through the teaching of Julius Schaller and Johann Erdmann. In 1845 he became a follower of the Tübingen school, and in his work Das Evangelium Marcions und das kanonische Evangelium des Lukas, published in 1846 and in which he argued that the Gospel of Luke was based on the apocryphal Gospel of Marcion, he appears as a disciple of the Hegelian new testament scholarFerdinand Baur. This did not last long with him, however, for the second edition (1857) of his most important work, on the origin of the Old Catholic Church (Die Entstehung der alt-kathol. Kirche), shows considerable divergence from the first edition (1850), and reveals an entire emancipation from Baur's method.
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Alexander Bickel
Alexander Mordecai Bickel (December 17, 1924 – November 8, 1974) was a law professor and expert on the United States Constitution. One of the most influential constitutional commentators of the twentieth century, his writings emphasize judicial restraint.
Bickel was born to Jewish parents (Solomon and Yetta Bickel), originally from Bucharest, Romania, who had immigrated to Brooklyn, NY. He graduated from Harvard Law School summa cum laude. He served as a law clerk to Justice Felix Frankfurter of the Supreme Court of the United States in the 1952 term, preparing a historical memorandum urging that Brown v. Board of Education be reargued. Starting in 1956, he taught at Yale Law School until his death. With Charles Black, he forged what has become one of the world's great centers for the study of constitutional law.
A frequent contributor to Commentary, New Republic and the New York Times, Bickel argued against "prior restraint" of the press by the government as part of the successful representation of the New York Times in the Pentagon Papers case (1971). He also defended President Richard Nixon’s order to dismiss special Watergate prosecutor Archibald Cox.
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Alvin Goldman
Alvin Ira Goldman (born 1938) is an American professor of Philosophy at Rutgers University in New Jersey. He previously taught at the University of Michigan and at the University of Arizona. He earned his PhD from Princeton University and is married to Holly Smith, a well known ethicist, former administrator, and current professor at Rutgers University. He has done influential work on a wide range of philosophical topics, but his principal areas of research are epistemology, philosophy of mind, and cognitive science.
Goldman's early book, A Theory of Human Action (a revised version of his Ph.D. thesis), presents a systematic way of classifying and relating the many actions we perform at any time. Its influence was broad and can be found in, among other writings, John Rawls' book A Theory of Justice. Goldman's early work in action theory soon gave way to work in other branches of philosophy, most influentially epistemology.
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Alvin Plantinga
Alvin Carl Plantinga (born November 15, 1932) is an American analytic philosopher, the emeritus John A. O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame and the inaugural holder of the Jellema Chair in Philosophy at Calvin College.
He is known for his work in philosophy of religion, epistemology, metaphysics and Christian apologetics. Plantinga is the author of a number of books including God and Other Minds (1967), The Nature of Necessity (1974), and the "warrant" series culminating in Warranted Christian Belief (2000). He has delivered the Gifford Lectures three times, and was described by Time magazine as "America's leading orthodox Protestant philosopher of God".
Plantinga was born on November 15, 1932 in Ann Arbor, Michigan to Cornelius A. Plantinga (1908–1994) and Lettie G. Bossenbroek (1908–2007). Plantinga's father was a first generation immigrant, born in the Netherlands. His family is from the Dutch province of Friesland. Plantinga’s father earned a Ph.D. in philosophy from Duke University and a Master's Degree in psychology, and taught several academic subjects at different colleges over the years. One of Plantinga's brothers, Cornelius "Neal" Plantinga, Jr., is a theologian and the former president of Calvin Theological Seminary. Another of his brothers, Leon, is an emeritus professor of musicology at Yale University. His brother Terrell worked for CBS News.
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Anselm of Canterbury
Anselm of Canterbury (Aosta c. 1033 – Canterbury 21 April 1109), also called of Aosta for his birthplace, and of Bec for his home monastery, was a Benedictine monk, a philosopher, and a prelate of the Church who held the office of Archbishop of Canterbury from 1093 to 1109. Called the founder of scholasticism, he is famous as the originator of the ontological argument for the existence of God.
Born into the House of Candia, he entered the Benedictine order at the Abbey of Bec at the age of 27, where he became abbot in 1079. He became Archbishop of Canterbury under William II of England, and was exiled from England from 1097 to 1100, and again from 1105 to 1107 under Henry I of England as a result of the investiture controversy, the most significant conflict between Church and state in Medieval Europe.
Anselm was proclaimed a Doctor of the Church in 1720 by a Papal Bull of Pope Clement XI.
Anselm was born under the name "Anselmus Candiae Genavae" (Italian: Anselmo di Candia Ginevra, French: Anselme de Candie Genève) at or nearAosta in the Kingdom of Arles (currently the capital of the Aosta Valley region in Northern Italy) around 1033. His family was noble (they were related by blood to the ascendant House of Savoy) and owned considerable property. His parents were from a noble lineage and holders of fiefdoms within the Burgundian territories. His father, Gundulf de Candia, was by birth a Lombard of the House of Candia; he seems to have been harsh. His mother, Ermenberga of Geneva, was regarded as prudent and virtuous; she was related to Otto, Count of Savoy.
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Anthony Kenny
Sir Anthony John Patrick Kenny FBA (born 16 March 1931 in Liverpool) is an English philosopher whose interests lie in the philosophy of mind, ancient and scholastic philosophy, the philosophy of Wittgenstein and the philosophy of religion. With Peter Geach, he has made a significant contribution to Analytical Thomism, a movement whose aim is to present the thought of St Thomas Aquinas in the style of modern philosophy by clearing away the trappings and obscurities of traditional Thomism. He is one of the executors of Wittgenstein's literary estate. He is a former President of the British Academy and the Royal Institute of Philosophy.
Kenny initially trained as a Roman Catholic priest at the Venerable English College, Rome, where he received the degree of S.T.L. He was ordained in 1955 and served as Curate in Liverpool 1959-63. Having received his D.Phil. from the University of Oxford (St Benet's Hall) in 1961, he also worked as an Assistant Lecturer in the University of Liverpool (1961–63). However, he questioned the validity of Catholic doctrine and is now an agnostic. He was returned to the lay state in 1963, but according to Canon law his priestly ordination remains valid. He was never dispensed from the obligation of clerical celibacy and was therefore excommunicated on his marriage to Nancy Gayley in 1965.
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Antony Flew
Antony Garrard Newton Flew (11 February 1923 – 8 April 2010) was a British philosopher. Belonging to the analytic and evidentialist schools of thought, he was notable for his works on the philosophy of religion.
Flew was a strong advocate of atheism, arguing that one should presuppose atheism until empirical evidence of a God surfaces. He also criticised the idea of life after death, the free will defence to the problem of evil, and the meaningfulness of the concept of God. However, in 2004 he stated an allegiance to deism, more specifically a belief in the Aristotelian God, stating that in keeping his lifelong commitment to go where the evidence leads, he now believes in the existence of God.
He later wrote the book There is a God: How the World's Most Notorious Atheist Changed His Mind, with contributions from Roy Abraham Varghese. This book (and Flew's conversion itself) has been the subject of controversy, following an article in the New York Times magazine alleging that Flew had mentally declined, and that Varghese was the primary author. The matter remains contentious, with some commentators including PZ Myers and Richard Carrier supporting the allegations, and others, including Flew himself, opposing them.
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Aristotle
Aristotle (Ancient Greek: Ἀριστοτέλης, Aristotélēs) (384 BC – 322 BC) was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology. Together with Plato and Socrates (Plato's teacher), Aristotle is one of the most important founding figures in Western philosophy. Aristotle's writings were the first to create a comprehensive system of Western philosophy, encompassing morality, aesthetics, logic, science, politics, and metaphysics.
Aristotle's views on the physical sciences profoundly shaped medieval scholarship, and their influence extended well into the Renaissance, although they were ultimately replaced by Newtonian physics. In the zoological sciences, some of his observations were confirmed to be accurate only in the 19th century. His works contain the earliest known formal study of logic, which was incorporated in the late 19th century into modern formal logic. In metaphysics, Aristotelianism had a profound influence on philosophical and theological thinking in the Islamic and Jewish traditions in the Middle Ages, and it continues to influence Christian theology, especially the scholastic tradition of the Catholic Church. His ethics, though always influential, gained renewed interest with the modern advent of virtue ethics. All aspects of Aristotle's philosophy continue to be the object of active academic study today. Though Aristotle wrote many elegant treatises and dialogues (Cicero described his literary style as "a river of gold"), it is thought that the majority of his writings are now lost and only about one-third of the original works have survived.
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Arthur Danto
Arthur Coleman Danto (born January 1, 1924 is an American art critic and philosopher. He is best known as the influential, long-time art critic for The Nation and for his work in philosophical aesthetics and philosophy of history, though he has contributed significantly to a number of fields. His interests span thought, feeling, philosophy of art, theories of representation, philosophical psychology, Hegel's aesthetics, and the philosophers Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Arthur Schopenhauer.
Danto was born in Ann Arbor, Michigan, January 1, 1924, and grew up in Detroit. After spending two years in the Army, Danto studied art and history at Wayne University (now Wayne State University) and then pursued graduate study in philosophy at Columbia University. From 1949 to 1950, Danto studied in Paris on a Fulbright scholarship under Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and in 1951 returned to teach at Columbia, where he is currently Johnsonian Professor of Philosophy Emeritus.
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four separate manifestations of reason in the phenomenal world.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally what humans recognize in themselves as their will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fully satisfied. The corollary of this is an ultimately painful human condition. Consequently, he considered that a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta, Buddhism and the Church Fathers of early Christianity, was the only way to attain liberation.
Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche,Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein,Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges.
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Auguste Comte
Isidore Auguste Marie François Xavier Comte (19 January 1798 – 5 September 1857), better known as Auguste Comte [oɡyst kɔ̃t], was a French philosopher. He was a founder of the discipline of sociology and of the doctrine of positivism. He may be regarded as the first philosopher of science in the modern sense of the term.
Strongly influenced by the Utopian socialist Henri Saint-Simon, Comte developed the positive philosophy in an attempt to remedy the social malaise of the French revolution, calling for a new social doctrine based on the sciences. Comte was a major influence on 19th century thought, impacting the work of social thinkers such as Karl Marx, John Stuart Mill, and George Eliot. His concept of sociologie and social evolutionism, though now outdated, set the tone for early social theorists and anthropologists such as Harriet Martineau and Herbert Spencer, evolving into Modern academic sociology presented by Émile Durkheim as practical and objective social research.
Comte's social theories culminated in the "religion of humanity", which was influential to the development of religious humanist and Secular Humanist organizations in the 19th century. Comte likewise coined the word "altruism".
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Augustine of Hippo
Augustine of Hippo ( /ɒˈɡʌstɨn/ or /ˈɔːɡəstɪn/;Latin: Aurelius Augustinus Hipponensis; November 13, 354 – August 28, 430), also known as Augustine, St. Augustine, St. Austin,St. Augoustinos, Blessed Augustine, or St. Augustine the Blessed, was Bishop of Hippo Regius (present-day Annaba, Algeria). He was a Latin philosopher and theologian from Roman Africa. His writings were very influential in the development of Western Christianity.
According to his contemporary, Jerome, Augustine "established anew the ancient Faith." In his early years he was heavily influenced by Manichaeism and afterward by the Neo-Platonism of Plotinus. After his conversion to Christianity and baptism in AD 387, Augustine developed his own approach to philosophy and theology, accommodating a variety of methods and different perspectives. He believed that the grace of Christ was indispensable to human freedom, and he framed the concepts of original sin and just war.
When the Western Roman Empire was starting to disintegrate, Augustine developed the concept of the Catholic Church as a spiritual City of God (in a book of the same name), distinct from the material Earthly City. His thoughts profoundly influenced the medieval worldview. Augustine's City of God was closely identified with the Church, the community that worshipped God.
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Averroes
ʾAbū l-Walīd Muḥammad bin ʾAḥmad bin Rušd (Arabic: أبو الوليد محمد بن احمد بن رشد), better known just as Ibn Rushd (Arabic: ابن رشد), and in European literature as Averroes ( /əˈvɛroʊ.iːz/; April 14, 1126 – December 10, 1198), was an Andalusian Muslim polymath; a master of Aristotelian philosophy, Islamic philosophy, Islamic theology, Maliki law and jurisprudence, logic, psychology, politics, Arabic music theory, and the sciences of medicine, astronomy, geography, mathematics, physics and celestial mechanics. He was born in Córdoba, Al Andalus, modern-day Spain, and died in Marrakesh, Morocco. His school of philosophy is known as Averroism.
Ibn Rushd was a defender of Aristotelian philosophy against claims from the influential Islamic theologian Ghazali who attacked philosophy so it would not become an affront to the teachings of Islam.
Averroes' name is also seen as Averroës, Averroès or Averrhoës, indicating that the "o" and the "e" form separate syllables. Averroes is a Latinisation of a Hebrew transcription of the Arab name Ibn Rushd.
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Averroism
Averroism is the term applied to either of two philosophical trends among scholastics in the late 13th century: (a) the Arab philosopher Averroës or Ibn Rushd's interpretations of Aristotle and his reconciliation of Aristotelianism with Islamic faith; and (b) the application of these ideas in the Latin Christian and Jewish intellectual traditions, such as Siger of Brabant, Boetius of Dacia, and Maimonides. The term was originally coined by Ernst Renan.
Averroes at the time of Dante Alighieri was probably the most widely condemned thinker in the medieval Christian world... Averroism became virtually synonymous with atheism in the late Middle Ages and early Renaissance . As an historiographical category it was first developed by Ernest Renan in Averroès et l'averroïsme (1852). Later historians applied the name to significant uses and expressions of elements of Averroes' doctrines and to the exegetical tradition of Aristotle by Jewish and Christian thinkers as it had come down through the Latin and Hebrew traditions. "Averroist" can therefore describe a range of positions, up to and including scholars interested in the historical phenomenon of Averroes' influence[citation needed].
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Avicenna
Abū ʿAlī al-Ḥusayn ibn ʿAbd Allāh ibn Sīnā (Persian پورسينا Pur Sina [ˈpuːr ˈsiːnɑː] "son of Sina"; c. 980, Afshana near Bukhara– 1037, Hamadan, Iran), commonly known as Ibn Sīnā or by his Latinized name Avicenna, was a Persianpolymath, who wrote almost 450 treatises on a wide range of subjects, of which around 240 have survived. In particular, 150 of his surviving treatises concentrate on philosophy and 40 of them concentrate on medicine.
His most famous works are The Book of Healing, a vast philosophical and scientific encyclopaedia, and The Canon of Medicine, which was a standard medical text at many medieval universities. The Canon of Medicine was used as a text-book in the universities of Montpellier and Leuven as late as 1650. Ibn Sīnā's Canon of Medicine provides a complete system of medicine according to the principles of Galen (and Hippocrates).
His corpus also includes writing on philosophy, astronomy, alchemy, geology, psychology, Islamic theology, logic, mathematics, physics, as well as poetry. He is regarded as the most famous and influential polymath of the Islamic Golden Age.
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Ayn Rand
Ayn Rand ( /ˈaɪn ˈrænd/; born Alisa Zinov'yevna Rosenbaum, February 2 [O.S. January 20] 1905 – March 6, 1982) was a Russian-American novelist, philosopher, playwright, and screenwriter. She is known for her two best-selling novels The Fountainhead and Atlas Shrugged and for developing a philosophical system she called Objectivism.
Born and educated in Russia, Rand moved to the United States in 1926. She worked as a screenwriter in Hollywood and had a play produced on Broadway in 1935–1936. After two initially unsuccessful early novels, she achieved fame with her 1943 novel The Fountainhead. In 1957, she published her best-known work, the philosophical novel Atlas Shrugged. Afterward she turned to nonfiction to promote her philosophy, publishing her own magazines and releasing several collections of essays until her death in 1982.
Rand advocated reason as the only means of acquiring knowledge and rejected all forms of faith and religion. She supported rational and ethical egoism, and rejected ethical altruism. In politics, she condemned the initiation of force as immoral and opposed all forms of collectivism and statism, instead supporting laissez-faire capitalism, which she believed was the only social system that protected individual rights. She promoted romantic realism in art. She was sharply critical of the philosophers and philosophical traditions known to her besides Aristotle.
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Baruch Spinoza
Baruch Spinoza and later Benedict de Spinoza (24 November 1632 – 21 February 1677) was a Dutch philosopher. Revealing considerable scientific aptitude, the breadth and importance of Spinoza's work was not fully realized until years after his death. By laying the groundwork for the 18th century Enlightenment[citation needed] and modern biblical criticism, he came to be considered one of the great rationalists of 17th-century philosophy. His magnum opus, the posthumous Ethics, in which he opposed Descartes's mind–body dualism, has earned him recognition as one of Western philosophy's most important contributors. In the Ethics, "Spinoza wrote the last indisputable Latin masterpiece, and one in which the refined conceptions of medieval philosophy are finally turned against themselves and destroyed entirely." Philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel said of all contemporary philosophers, "You are either a Spinozist or not a philosopher at all."
Spinoza's name in different languages is Hebrew: ברוך שפינוזה Baruch Spinoza, Portuguese: Benedito or Bento de Espinosa and Latin: Benedictus de Spinoza; in all these languages, the given name means "the Blessed". Spinoza was raised in the Portuguese Jewish community in Amsterdam. He developed highly controversial ideas regarding the authenticity of the Hebrew Bible and the nature of the Divine. The Jewish religious authorities issued a cherem (Hebrew: חרם, a kind of ban, shunning, ostracism, expulsion, or excommunication) against him, effectively excluding him from Jewish society at age 23. His books were also later put on the Catholic Church's Index of Forbidden Books.
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Benjamin Franklin
Benjamin Franklin (January 17, 1706 [O.S. January 6, 1705] – April 17, 1790) was one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. A noted polymath, Franklin was a leading author, printer, political theorist, politician, postmaster, scientist, musician, inventor, satirist, civic activist, statesman, and diplomat. As a scientist, he was a major figure in the American Enlightenment and the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. He invented the lightning rod, bifocals, the Franklin stove, a carriage odometer, and the glass 'armonica'. He formed both the first public lending library in America and the first fire department in Pennsylvania.
Franklin earned the title of "The First American" for his early and indefatigable campaigning for colonial unity; as an author and spokesman in London for several colonies, then as the first United States Ambassador to France, he exemplified the emerging American nation. Franklin was foundational in defining the American ethos as a marriage of the practical and democratic values of thrift, hard work, education, community spirit, self-governing institutions, and opposition to authoritarianism both political and religious, with the scientific and tolerant values of the Enlightenment. In the words of historian Henry Steele Commager, "In a Franklin could be merged the virtues of Puritanism without its defects, the illumination of the Enlightenment without its heat." To Walter Isaacson, this makes Franklin "the most accomplished American of his age and the most influential in inventing the type of society America would become."
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Bernard Williams
Sir Bernard Arthur Owen Williams (21 September 1929 – 10 June 2003) was an English moral philosopher, described by The Times as the most brilliant and most important British moral philosopher of his time. His publications include Problems of the Self (1973), Moral Luck (1981), Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (1985), and Truth and Truthfulness (2002). He was knighted in 1999.
As Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Deutsch Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, Williams became known internationally for his attempt to reorient the study of moral philosophy to history and culture, politics and psychology, and in particular to the Greeks. Described as an analytic philosopher with the soul of a humanist, he saw himself as a synthesist, drawing together ideas from fields that seemed increasingly unable to communicate with one another. He rejected scientism, and scientific or evolutionary reductionism, calling "morally unimaginative" reductionists "the people I really do dislike." For Williams, complexity was irreducible, beautiful, and meaningful.
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Bertrand Russell
Bertrand Arthur William Russell, 3rd Earl Russell, OM, FRS (18 May 1872 – 2 February 1970) was a British philosopher, logician, mathematician, historian, and social critic. At various points in his life he considered himself a liberal, a socialist, and a pacifist, but he also admitted that he had never been any of these in any profound sense. He was born in Monmouthshire, into one of the most prominent aristocratic families in Britain.
Russell led the British "revolt against idealism" in the early 20th century. He is considered one of the founders of analytic philosophy along with his predecessor Gottlob Frege and his friend Ludwig Wittgenstein, and is widely held to be one of the 20th century's premier logicians. He co-authored, with A. N. Whitehead, Principia Mathematica, an attempt to ground mathematics on logic. His philosophical essay "On Denoting" has been considered a "paradigm of philosophy." His work has had a considerable influence on logic, mathematics, set theory, linguistics, computer science (see type theory and type system), and philosophy, especially philosophy of language, epistemology, and metaphysics.
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Blaise Pascal
Blaise Pascal (French pronunciation: [blɛz paskal]; 19 June 1623 – 19 August 1662), was a French mathematician, physicist, inventor, writer and Catholic philosopher. He was a child prodigy who was educated by his father, a tax collector in Rouen. Pascal's earliest work was in the natural and applied sciences where he made important contributions to the study of fluids, and clarified the concepts of pressure and vacuum by generalizing the work of Evangelista Torricelli. Pascal also wrote in defense of the scientific method.
In 1642, while still a teenager, he started some pioneering work on calculating machines, and after three years of effort and 50 prototypes he invented the mechanical calculator. He built twenty of these machines (called the Pascaline) in the following ten years. Pascal was an important mathematician, helping create two major new areas of research: he wrote a significant treatise on the subject of projective geometry at the age of sixteen, and later corresponded with Pierre de Fermat on probability theory, strongly influencing the development of modern economics and social science. Following Galileo and Torricelli, in 1646 he refuted Aristotle's followers who insisted that nature abhors a vacuum. Pascal's results caused many disputes before being accepted.
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Boethius
Anicius Manlius Severinus Boëthius, commonly called Boethius (ca. 480–524 or 525 AD) was a philosopher of the early 6th century. He was born in Rome to an ancient and prominent family which included emperors Petronius Maximus and Olybrius and many consuls. His father, Flavius Manlius Boethius, was consul in 487 after Odoacer deposed the last Western Roman Emperor. Boethius, of the noble Anicia family, entered public life at a young age and was already a senator by the age of 25. Boethius himself was consul in 510 in the kingdom of the Ostrogoths. In 522 he saw his two sons become consuls. Boethius was imprisoned and eventually executed by King Theodoric the Great, who suspected him of conspiring with the Eastern Roman Empire. While jailed, Boethius composed his Consolation of Philosophy, a philosophical treatise on fortune, death, and other issues. The Consolation became one of the most popular and influential works of the Middle Ages. A link between Boethius and a mathematical boardgame Rithmomachia has been made.
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Béatrice Longuenesse
Béatrice Longuenesse is a professor of philosophy at New York University. She was a student at the École Normale Supérieure (Paris, France) and the University of Paris - Sorbonne. She joined the philosophy department at Princeton University in 1993. She left Princeton for the philosophy department at New York University in 2004. She has published several books, including Kant and the Capacity to Judge (1998), Kant on the Human Standpoint (2005), Hegel’s Critique of Metaphysics (2007).
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Carl Friedrich Gauss
Johann Carl Friedrich Gauss ( /ˈɡaʊs/; German: Gauß listen (help·info), Latin: Carolus Fridericus Gauss) (30 April 1777 – 23 February 1855) was a German mathematician and physical scientist who contributed significantly to many fields, including number theory, statistics, analysis, differential geometry, geodesy, geophysics, electrostatics, astronomy and optics.
Sometimes referred to as the Princeps mathematicorum (Latin, "the Prince of Mathematicians" or "the foremost of mathematicians") and "greatest mathematician since antiquity", Gauss had a remarkable influence in many fields of mathematics and science and is ranked as one of history's most influential mathematicians. He referred to mathematics as "the queen of sciences".
Carl Friedrich Gauss was born on 30 April 1777 in Braunschweig, in the duchy of Braunschweig-Wolfenbüttel, now part of Lower Saxony, Germany, as the son of poor working-class parents. Indeed, his mother was illiterate and never recorded the date of his birth, remembering only that he had been born on a Wednesday, eight days before the Feast of the Ascension, which itself occurs 40 days after Easter. Gauss would later solve this puzzle for his birthdate in the context of finding the date of Easter, deriving methods to compute the date in both past and future years. He was christened and confirmed in a church near the school he attended as a child.
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Carl Gustav Hempel
Carl Gustav "Peter" Hempel (January 8, 1905 in Oranienburg, Germany - November 9, 1997 in Princeton, New Jersey) was a philosopher of science and a major figure in 20th-century logical empiricism. He is especially well known for his articulation of the Deductive-nomological model of scientific explanation, which was considered the "standard model" of scientific explanation during the 1950s and 1960s. He is also known for the Raven paradox, which highlights the problem of induction.
Hempel studied mathematics, physics, and philosophy at the University of Göttingen, Heidelberg and Berlin. In Göttingen he encountered David Hilbert and was impressed by his attempt to base all of mathematics on solid logical foundations derived from a limited number of axioms (Hilbert's Program). Having moved to Berlin he participated in a congress on scientific philosophy in 1929, where he met Rudolf Carnap and became involved in the Berlin Circle of philosophers that was associated with the Vienna Circle. In 1934 he received his doctoral degree from the University of Berlin with a dissertation on probability theory.
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Carl Jung
Carl Gustav Jung (/ˈjʊŋ/ YUUNG; German: [ˈkarl ˈɡʊstaf ˈjʊŋ]; 26 July 1875 – 6 June 1961) was a Swiss psychiatrist, the founder of analytical psychology. Jung is considered the first modern psychiatrist to view the human psyche as "by nature religious" and make it the focus of exploration. Jung is one of the best known researchers in the field of dream analysis and symbolization. While he was a fully involved and practicing clinician, much of his life's work was spent exploring tangential areas, including Eastern and Western philosophy, alchemy, astrology, and sociology, as well as literature and the arts.
Jung considered individuation, a psychological process of integrating the opposites including the conscious with the unconscious while still maintaining their relative autonomy, necessary for a person to become whole. Individuation is the central concept of analytical psychology.
Many psychological concepts were first proposed by Jung, including the archetype, the collective unconscious, the complex, and synchronicity. Popular psychometric instruments like the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI), have been principally developed from Jung's theories.
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Carl Schmitt
Carl Schmitt (July 11, 1888 – April 7, 1985) was a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, and professor of law.
Schmitt published several essays, influential in the 20th century and beyond, on the mentalities that surround the effective wielding of political power. His ideas have attracted the attention of numerous philosophers and political theorists, including Walter Benjamin, Leo Strauss, Jacques Derrida, Étienne Balibar, Hannah Arendt, Giorgio Agamben, Antonio Negri, Gianfranco Miglio, Paolo Virno, Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Jacob Taubes, Gillian Rose, Chantal Mouffe, Eric Voegelin, Reinhart Koselleck, Álvaro d'Ors, and Paul Gottfried. Much of his work, especially from the Weimar period, remains both influential and controversial today.
Schmitt, whose father was a minor businessman, was the son of Roman Catholic parents from the German Eifel region who settled in Plettenberg, Westphalia. He studied law in Berlin, Munich and Strasbourg and took his graduation and state exams in the then-German Strasbourg in 1915. He volunteered for the army in 1916. The same year, he earned his habilitation in Strasbourg. He taught at various business schools and universities - in Munich, Greifswald, Bonn, Berlin, and Cologne.
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Cesare Beccaria
Cesare, Marquis of Beccaria-Bonesana (Italian pronunciation: [ˈtʃɛzare bekkaˈria]; March 15, 1738 – November 28, 1794) was an Italian jurist, philosopher and politician best known for his treatise On Crimes and Punishments (1764), which condemned torture and the death penalty, and was a founding work in the field of penology.
Beccaria was born in Milan on March 15, 1738 and educated in the Jesuit college at Parma. Then he graduated in Law from the University of Pavia in 1758. At first, he showed a great aptitude for mathematics, but the study of Montesquieu redirected his attention towards economics. His first publication, in 1762, was a tract on the disorder of the currency in the Milanese states, with a proposal for its remedy. During this time Beccaria, with the brothers Alessandro and Pietro Verri and a number of other young men from the Milan aristocracy formed a literary society, which was named "L'Accademia dei pugni" (the Academy of Fists), a playful name that made fun of the stuffy academies that proliferated in Italy and also because relaxed conversations that were taking place in there were sometimes ending in affrays.[citation needed]
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Charles Hartshorne
Charles Hartshorne (June 5, 1897 – October 9, 2000) was a prominent American philosopher who concentrated primarily on the philosophy of religion and metaphysics. He developed the neoclassical idea of God and produced a modal proof of the existence of God that was a development of St. Anselm's Ontological Argument. Hartshorne is also noted for developing Alfred North Whitehead's process philosophy into process theology.
Hartshorne (pronounced harts-horn) was born in Kittanning, Pennsylvania, and was the son of Reverend F.C. Hartshorne. Among his brothers was the prominent geographer Richard Hartshorne. Charles attended Haverford College between 1915–17, but then spent two years as a hospital orderly serving in the US Army. He then studied at Harvard University, where he earned the B.A. (1921), M.A. (1922) and PhD (1923) degrees. His doctoral dissertation was on "The Unity of Being". He obtained all three degrees in only four years, an accomplishment believed unique in Harvard's long history.
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Christine Korsgaard
Christine Marion Korsgaard (born 1952 in Chicago, Illinois)[citation needed] is an American philosopher and academic whose main scholarly interests are in moral philosophy and its history; the relation of issues in moral philosophy to issues in metaphysics, the philosophy of mind, and the theory of personal identity; the theory of personal relationships; and in normativity in general. She has taught at Yale, the University of California at Santa Barbara, and the University of Chicago; since 1991 she has been a professor at Harvard University, where she is now Arthur Kingsley Porter Professor of Philosophy.
Korsgaard received a B.A. from the University of Illinois and a Ph.D from Harvard, where she was a student of John Rawls. She also received an LHD Doctor of Humane Letters from the University of Illinois in 2004.[citation needed]
In 1996, Korsgaard published a book entitled The Sources of Normativity, which was the revised version of her Tanner Lectures on Human Values, and also a collection of her past papers on Kant's moral philosophy and Kantian approaches to contemporary moral philosophy: Creating the Kingdom of Ends. In 2002, she gave the John Locke Lectures at the University of Oxford, which turned into her most recent book, Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity.
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Cicero
Marcus Tullius Cicero ( /ˈsɪsɨroʊ/; Classical Latin: [ˈkɪkɛroː]; January 3, 106 BC – December 7, 43 BC; sometimes anglicized as Tully), was a Roman philosopher, statesman, lawyer, orator, political theorist, Roman consul and constitutionalist. He came from a wealthy municipal family of the equestrian order, and is widely considered one of Rome's greatest orators and prose stylists.
He introduced the Romans to the chief schools of Greek philosophy and created a Latin philosophical vocabulary (with neologisms such as humanitas, qualitas, quantitas, and essentia) distinguishing himself as a linguist, translator, and philosopher.
Petrarch's rediscovery of Cicero's letters is often credited for initiating the 14th-century Renaissance. According to Polish historian Tadeusz Zieliński, "Renaissance was above all things a revival of Cicero, and only after him and through him of the rest of Classical antiquity." The peak of Cicero's authority and prestige came during the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, and his impact on leading Enlightenment thinkers such as John Locke, David Hume, and Montesquieu was substantial. His works rank among the most influential in European culture, and today still constitute one of the most important bodies of primary material for the writing and revision of Roman history, especially the last days of the Roman Republic.
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Clement Greenberg
Clement Greenberg (January 16, 1909 – May 7, 1994) was an American essayist known mainly as an influential visual art critic closely associated with American Modern art of the mid-20th century. In particular, he is best remembered for his promotion of the abstract expressionist movement and was among the first published critics to praise the work of painter Jackson Pollock.
Clement Greenberg was born in the borough of the Bronx, NYC, in 1909. His parents were middle-class Jewish immigrants, and he was the oldest of their three sons. Since childhood, Greenberg sketched compulsively, until becoming a young adult, when he began to focus on literature. Greenberg attended Erasmus Hall High School, the Marquand School for Boys, then Syracuse University, graduating with an A.B. in 1930, cum laude, Phi Beta Kappa. After college, already as fluent in Yiddish as well as English since childhood, Greenberg taught himself Italian and German in addition to French and Latin. During the next few years, Greenberg travelled the U.S. working for his father's dry-goods business, but the work did not suit his inclinations, so he turned to working as a translator. Greenberg married in 1934, had a son the next year, and was divorced the year after that. In 1936, Greenberg took a series of jobs with the federal government, from Civil Service Administration, to the Veterans' Administration, and finally to the Appraisers' Division of the Customs Service in 1937. It was then that Greenberg began to write seriously, and soon after began getting published in a handful of small magazines and literary journals.
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Clive Bell
Arthur Clive Heward Bell (16 September 1881, East Shefford – 18 September 1964, London) was an English Art critic, associated with formalism and the Bloomsbury Group.
Bell was born in East Shefford, Berkshire, in 1881. He was the third of four children of William Heward Bell (1849–1927) and Hannah Taylor Cory (1850–1942), with an elder brother (Cory), an elder sister (Lorna Bell Acton), and a younger sister (Dorothy Bell Honey). His father was a civil engineer who built his fortune in the family coal mines in Wiltshire in England and Merthyr Tydfil in Wales, and the family was well off. They lived at Cleve House in Seend near Melksham in Wiltshire, which was adorned with Squire Bell's many hunting trophies.
He was educated at Marlborough and at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he studied history. In 1902 he received an Earl of Derby scholarship to study in Paris, where his interest in art originated. On his return to England, he moved to London, where he met and married the artist Vanessa Stephen — sister of Virginia Woolf — in 1907. Reportedly, Virginia flirted with Clive despite her sister's marriage to him.
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Confucius
Confucius (551–479 BC) was a Chinese teacher, editor, politician, and philosopher of the Spring and Autumn Period of Chinese history.
The philosophy of Confucius emphasized personal and governmental morality, correctness of social relationships, justice, and sincerity. His followers competed successfully with many other schools during the Hundred Schools of Thought era only to be suppressed in favor of the Legalists during the Qin Dynasty. Following the victory of Han over Chu after the collapse of Qin, Confucius's thoughts received official sanction and were further developed into a system known as Confucianism.
Confucius is traditionally credited with having authored or edited many of the Chinese classic texts including all of the Five Classics, but modern scholars are cautious of attributing specific assertions to Confucius himself. Aphorisms concerning his teachings were compiled in the Analects, but only many years after his death.
Confucius's principles had a basis in common Chinese tradition and belief. He championed strong family loyalty, ancestor worship, respect of elders by their children (and in traditional interpretations of husbands by their wives), and family as a basis for ideal government. He espoused the well-known principle "Do not do to others what you do not want done to yourself", an early version of the Golden Rule.
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Curt John Ducasse
Curt John Ducasse (7 July 1881 - 3 September 1969) was a philosopher who taught at the University of Washington and Brown University.
Ducasse was born in Angoulême, France. He is most notable for his work in philosophy of mind and aesthetics, and his influence can be seen in the work of Roderick Chisholm and Wilfrid Sellars. Ducasse served as the president of the Eastern division of the American Philosophical Association in 1939-40.
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Daniel Dennett
Daniel Clement Dennett (born March 28, 1942) is an American philosopher, writer and cognitive scientist whose research centers on the philosophy of mind, philosophy of science and philosophy of biology, particularly as those fields relate to evolutionary biology and cognitive science. He is currently the Co-director of the Center for Cognitive Studies, the Austin B. Fletcher Professor of Philosophy, and a University Professor at Tufts University. Dennett is a firm atheist and secularist, a member of the Secular Coalition for America advisory board, as well as an outspoken supporter of the Brights movement. Dennett is referred to as one of the "Four Horsemen of New Atheism," along with Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris, and the late Christopher Hitchens.
Born in Boston, Massachusetts, Dennett spent part of his childhood in Lebanon, where, during World War II, his father was a covert counter-intelligence agent with the Office of Strategic Services posing as a cultural attaché to the American Embassy in Beirut. When he was five, his mother took him back to Massachusetts after his father died in an unexplained plane crash. His sister is the investigative journalist Charlotte Dennett.
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David Hilbert
David Hilbert, FRS (German pronunciation: [ˈdaːvɪt ˈhɪlbɐt]; January 23, 1862 – February 14, 1943) was a German mathematician. He is recognized as one of the most influential and universal mathematicians of the 19th and early 20th centuries. Hilbert discovered and developed a broad range of fundamental ideas in many areas, including invariant theory and the axiomatization of geometry. He also formulated the theory of Hilbert spaces, one of the foundations of functional analysis.
Hilbert adopted and warmly defended Georg Cantor's set theory and transfinite numbers. A famous example of his leadership in mathematics is his 1900 presentation of a collection of problems that set the course for much of the mathematical research of the 20th century.
Hilbert and his students contributed significantly to establishing rigor and developed important tools used in modern mathematical physics. Hilbert is known as one of the founders of proof theory and mathematical logic, as well as for being among the first to distinguish between mathematics and metamathematics.
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David Hume
David Hume (7 May [O.S. 26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and scepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment. Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions." A prominent figure in the sceptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
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David Prall
David Wight Prall (1886–1940) was a philosopher of art at the University of California.
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Denis Diderot
Denis Diderot (October 5, 1713 – July 31, 1784) was a French philosopher, art critic, and writer. He was a prominent person during the Enlightenment and is best known for serving as co-founder and chief editor of and contributor to the Encyclopédie.
Diderot also contributed to literature, notably with Jacques le fataliste et son maître (Jacques the Fatalist and his Master), which emulated Laurence Sterne in challenging conventions regarding novels and their structure and content, while also examining philosophical ideas about free will. Diderot is also known as the author of the dialogue, Le Neveu de Rameau (Rameau's Nephew), upon which many articles and sermons about consumer desire have been based. His articles included many topics of the Enlightenment.
Denis Diderot was born in Langres and began his formal education at the jesuitic Collège Louis-leGrand in Langres. In 1732 he earned a master of arts degree in philosophy. Then he entered at the Collège d’Harcourt in Paris. He abandoned the idea of entering the clergy and decided instead to study law. His study of law was short-lived however and in 1734 Diderot decided to become a writer. Because of his refusal to enter one of the learned professions, he was disowned by his father, and for the next ten years he lived a bohemian existence.
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Derek Parfit
Derek Parfit (born December 11, 1942; China) is a British philosopher who specializes in problems of personal identity, rationality and ethics, and the relations between them. His 1984 book Reasons and Persons (described by Alan Ryan in The Sunday Times as "something close to a work of genius") has been very influential. His most recent book, On What Matters (2011), has already been widely discussed, having circulated in draft form for many years. He has worked at Oxford for the whole of his academic career, and is presently an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. He is also a Visiting Professor of Philosophy at New York University, Harvard University, and Rutgers University. He is married to the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards.
Derek Parfit was born in Chengdu, China to Norman and Jessie Parfit (née Browne), both medical doctors who had moved to Western China in order to teach preventive medicine in missionary hospitals. The family returned to the United Kingdom about a year after Parfit was born, settling in Oxford. Parfit was sent to Eton. He later read Modern History at the University of Oxford, graduating in 1964. In 1965-66 he was Harkness Fellow at Columbia University and Harvard University. He abandoned historical studies for philosophy during the time he held the fellowship. He then returned to Oxford, spending many decades as a fellow of All Souls College.
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Desiderius Erasmus
Desiderius Erasmus Roterodamus (October 28, 1466? – July 12, 1536), known as Erasmus of Rotterdam, was a Dutch Renaissance humanist, Catholic priest, social critic, teacher, and theologian.
Erasmus was a classical scholar who wrote in a pure Latin style. He was an early proponent of religious toleration, and enjoyed the sobriquet "Prince of the Humanists"; he has been called "the crowning glory of the Christian humanists." Using humanist techniques for working on texts, he prepared important new Latin and Greek editions of the New Testament. These raised questions that would be influential in the Protestant Reformation and Catholic Counter-Reformation. He also wrote The Praise of Folly, Handbook of a Christian Knight, On Civility in Children, Copia: Foundations of the Abundant Style, Julius Exclusus, and many other works.
Erasmus lived through the Reformation period, but while he was critical of the Church, he did not join the cause of the Reformers. In relation to clerical abuses in the Church, Erasmus remained committed to reforming the Church from within. He also held to Catholic doctrines such as that of free will, which some Reformers rejected in favor of the doctrine of predestination. His middle road approach disappointed and even angered scholars in both camps.
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Dieter Henrich
Dieter Henrich (born 5 January 1927 in Marburg, Germany) is a German philosopher. A contemporary thinker in the tradition of German Idealism, Henrich is particularly known for the influence of Kant, Hegel and Fichte in his work.
Henrich studied philosophy between 1946 and 1950 at Marburg, Frankfurt and Heidelberg, writing his dissertation under the supervision of Hans-Georg Gadamer. A professor at the universities of Munich, Berlin and Heidelberg, he has also been a visiting professor to universities in the United States, such as Harvard and Columbia.
In 2008, Henrich was awarded the Dr. Leopold Lucas Prize by the University of Tübingen.
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Dorothy Emmet
Dorothy Mary Emmet (29 September 1904 – 20 September 2000) was a British philosopher and head of Manchester University's philosophy department for over twenty years. With Margaret Masterman and Richard Braithwaite she was a founder member of the Epiphany Philosophers.
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Duns Scotus
John (Johannes, Ioannes) Duns Scotus, O.F.M. (c. 1256 – November 18, 1308) was one of the more important theologians and philosophers of the High Middle Ages. He was given the medieval accolade Doctor Subtilis (Subtle Doctor) for his penetrating and subtle manner of thought.
Scotus has had considerable influence on Roman Catholic thought. The doctrines for which he is best known are the "univocity of being," that existence is the most abstract concept we have, applicable to everything that exists; the formal distinction, a way of distinguishing between different aspects of the same thing; and the idea of haecceity, the property supposed to be in each individual thing that makes it an individual. Scotus also developed a complex argument for the existence of God, and argued for the Immaculate conception of Mary.
Little is known of Scotus' life. He was probably born in 1265, probably at Duns, in Berwickshire, Scotland. In 1291 he was ordained as a priest in Northampton, England. A note in Codex 66 of Merton College, Oxford, records that Scotus "flourished at Cambridge, Oxford and Paris. He began lecturing on Peter Lombard's Sentences at the prestigious University of Paris in the Autumn of 1302. Later in that academic year, however, he was expelled from the University of Paris for siding with then Pope Boniface VIII in his feud with Philip the Fair of France, over the taxation of church property.
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Edmund Burke
Edmund Burke PC (12 January [NS] 1729– 9 July 1797) was an Irish statesman, author, orator, political theorist and philosopher who, after moving to England, served for many years in the House of Commons of Great Britain as a member of the Whig party.
He is mainly remembered for his support of the cause of the American Revolutionaries, and for his later opposition to the French Revolution. The latter led to his becoming the leading figure within the conservative faction of the Whig party, which he dubbed the "Old Whigs", in opposition to the pro–French Revolution "New Whigs", led by Charles James Fox.
Burke was praised by both conservatives and liberals in the 19th century.[citation needed] Since the 20th century, he has generally been viewed as the philosophical founder of modern Conservatism, as well as a representative of classical liberalism.
Burke was born in Dublin, Ireland, to a prosperous solicitor father (Richard; d. 1761) of the Church of Ireland. It is unclear if this is the same Richard Burke who converted from Catholicism. His mother Mary (c. 1702–1770), whose maiden name was Nagle, was a Roman Catholic and came from an impoverished but genteel County Cork family. The Burke dynasty descended from an Anglo-Norman surnamed de Burgh (Latinised as de Burgo) who arrived in Ireland in 1185 following the Norman invasion of Ireland by Henry II of England in 1171.)
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Edmund Gettier
Edmund L. Gettier III (born 1927 in Baltimore, Maryland) is an American philosopher and Professor Emeritus at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, known best for his 1963 paper, "Is Justified True Belief Knowledge?".
Gettier was educated at Cornell University, where his mentors included Max Black and Norman Malcolm. Gettier, himself, was originally attracted to the views of the later Ludwig Wittgenstein. His first teaching job was at Wayne State University in Detroit, Michigan, where his colleagues included Keith Lehrer, R. C. Sleigh, and Alvin Plantinga. Because he was short on publications, his colleagues urged him to write up any ideas he had just to satisfy the administration. The result was a three-page paper that remains one of the most famous in recent philosophical history. According to anecdotal comments that Plantinga has given in lectures, Gettier was originally so unenthused about the paper that he wrote it, had someone translate it into Spanish, and published in in an obscure South American journal. The paper was later published in the United States. Gettier has since published nothing, but he has invented and taught to his graduate students new methods for finding and illustrating countermodels in modal logic, as well as simplified semantics for various modal logics.
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Edmund Husserl
Edmund Gustav Albrecht Husserl (German pronunciation: [ˈhʊsɛʁl]; April 8, 1859, Proßnitz, Moravia, Austrian Empire – April 26, 1938, Freiburg, Germany) was a philosopher and mathematician and the founder of the 20th century philosophical school of phenomenology. He broke with the positivist orientation of the science and philosophy of his day, yet he elaborated critiques of historicism and of psychologism in logic. Not limited to empiricism, but believing that experience is the source of all knowledge, he worked on a method of phenomenological reduction by which a subject may come to know directly an essence.
Although born into a Jewish family, Husserl was baptized as a Lutheran in 1886. He studied mathematics under Karl Weierstrass and Leo Königsberger, and philosophy under Franz Brentano and Carl Stumpf. Husserl himself taught philosophy as a Privatdozent at Halle from 1887, then as professor, first at Göttingen from 1901, then at Freiburg from 1916 until he retired in 1928. Thereafter he gave two notable lectures: at Paris in 1929, and at Prague in 1935. The notorious 1933 race laws of the Nazi regime took away his academic standing and privileges. Following an illness, he died at Freiburg in 1938.
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Edward Bullough
Edward Bullough (28 March 1880 – 17 September 1934) was an English aesthetician and scholar of modern languages, who worked at the University of Cambridge. He did experimental work on the perception of colours, and in his theoretical work introduced the concept of psychical distance: that which "appears to lie between our own self and its affections" in aesthetic experience. In languages, Bullough was a dedicated teacher who published little. He came to concentrate on Italian, and was elected to the Chair of Italian at Cambridge in 1933.
Edward Bullough was born in Thun, Switzerland, on 28 March 1880, to John Bullough and Bertha Schmidlein. As a child he lived mostly in Germany, and was educated at Vitzthum Gymnasium, Dresden. At seventeen Bullough moved to England, and in 1899 matriculated from Trinity College in the University of Cambridge, where he studied Medieval and Modern Languages. He graduated BA (Class I) in 1902, MA in 1906, after which he taught French and German at Cambridge colleges and lectured in the university.
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Edward Gibbon
Edward Gibbon (27 April 1737 – 16 January 1794) was an English historian and Member of Parliament. His most important work, The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, was published in six volumes between 1776 and 1788. The Decline and Fall is known for the quality and irony of its prose, its use of primary sources, and its open criticism of organized religion.
Edward Gibbon was born in 1737, the son of Edward and Judith Gibbon at Lime Grove, in the town of Putney, Surrey. He had six siblings: five brothers and one sister, all of whom died in infancy. His grandfather, also named Edward, had lost all of his assets as a result of the South Sea Bubble stock market collapse in 1720, but eventually regained much of his wealth, so that Gibbon's father was able to inherit a substantial estate.
As a youth, his health was under constant threat. He described himself as "a puny child, neglected by my Mother, starved by my nurse." At age nine, Gibbon was sent to Dr. Woddeson's school at Kingston upon Thames (now Kingston Grammar School), shortly after which his mother died. He then took up residence in the Westminster School boarding house, owned by his adored "Aunt Kitty," Catherine Porten. Soon after she died in 1786, he remembered her as rescuing him from his mother's disdain, and imparting "the first rudiments of knowledge, the first exercise of reason, and a taste for books which is still the pleasure and glory of my life." By 1751, Gibbon's reading was already extensive and certainly pointed toward his future pursuits: Laurence Echard's Roman History (1713), William Howel(l)'s An Institution of General History (1680–85), and several of the 65 volumes of the acclaimed Universal History from the Earliest Account of Time (1747–1768).
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Emanuel Swedenborg
Emanuel Swedenborg (help·info) (born Emanuel Swedberg; January 29, 1688 – March 29, 1772) was a Swedish scientist, philosopher, theologian and Christian mystic. He termed himself a "Servant of the Lord Jesus Christ" in True Christian Religion, one of the works he published himself.
Swedenborg had a prolific career as an inventor and scientist. In 1741, at the age of 53, he entered into a spiritual phase in which he eventually began to experience dreams and visions beginning on Easter weekend April 6, 1744. This culminated in a spiritual awakening, whereupon he claimed he was appointed by the Lord to write a heavenly doctrine to reform Christianity. He claimed that the Lord had opened his spiritual eyes, so that from then on he could freely visit heaven and hell, and talk with angels, demons and other spirits.
He said that the Last Judgement had already occurred, in 1757, although only visible in the spiritual world, where he had witnessed it. That Judgement was followed by the Second Coming of Jesus Christ, which occurred, not by Christ in person, but by a revelation from Him through the inner, spiritual sense of the Word to Swedenborg. In fact, Swedenborg said, it is the presence of that spiritual sense that makes the Word Divine.
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Emil Brunner
Heinrich Emil Brunner (December 23, 1889, Winterthur – April 6, 1966, Zurich) was a Swiss Protestant (Reformed) theologian. Along with Karl Barth (see Relationship with Karl Barth), he is commonly associated with neo-orthodoxy or the dialectical theology movement.
Emil Brunner was born in Winterthur, near Zurich, Switzerland.
He studied at the universities of Zurich and Berlin, receiving his doctorate in theology from Zurich in 1913, with a dissertation on The Symbolic Element in Religious Knowledge. Brunner served as pastor from 1916 to 1924 in the mountain village of Obstalden in the Swiss Canton of Glarus. In 1919–1920 he spent a year in the United States studying at Union Theological Seminary in New York.
In 1921 Brunner published his Habilitationsschrift (a post-doctoral dissertation traditionally required in many countries in order to attain the position of a fully tenured professor) on Experience, Knowledge and Faith and in 1922 was appointed a Privatdozent at the University of Zurich. Soon after, another book followed: Mysticism and the Word (1924), which was a devastating critique of the liberal theology of Friedrich Schleiermacher. Brunner was rewarded for his literary efforts with his appointment in 1924 as Professor of Systematic and Practical Theology at the University of Zurich, a post which he held until his retirement in 1953. Following this appointment Brunner's reputation as a theologian continued to increase, particularly after the publication of two further important works in 1927, the first being The Philosophy of Religion from the Standpoint of Protestant Theology and second The Mediator.
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Emilio Betti
Emilio Betti (Camerino August 20, 1890 - Camorciano di Camerino August 11, 1968) was an Italian jurist, Roman Law scholar, philosopher and theologian. He is best known for his contributions to hermeneutics, part of a broad interest in interpretation. As a legal theorist, Betti is close to interpretivism.
Betti's intellectual support of fascism between the end of World War I and the beginning of the 1920ss led him to be arrested in 1944, in Camerino. Betti remained in prison for about a month, as decided by the Comitato di Liberazione Nazionale. In August 1945, Betti was presented to court and absolved of every accusation.
His political choices, anyway, have not diminished the value and importance of his work. Between many other things, Betti was one of the members of the drafting commission for the Italian civil code of 1942.
Betti is perhaps best known for his work in hermeneutics. He took issue with the hermeneutic views of Hans Georg Gadamer and argued that interpreters should attempt to reconstruct the author's intentions. His work influenced the work of E. D. Hirsch, the chief English-language spokesman for authorial intention. However, his influence in English has been limited by the lack of translations of his hermeneutic work.
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Epicurus
Epicurus (Ancient Greek: Ἐπίκουρος, Epikouros, "ally, comrade"; 341 BCE – 270 BCE) was an ancient Greek philosopher as well as the founder of the school of philosophy called Epicureanism. Only a few fragments and letters remain of Epicurus's 300 written works. Much of what is known about Epicurean philosophy derives from later followers and commentators.
For Epicurus, the purpose of philosophy was to attain the happy, tranquil life, characterized by ataraxia—peace and freedom from fear—and aponia—the absence of pain—and by living a self-sufficient life surrounded by friends. He taught that pleasure and pain are the measures of what is good and evil, that death is the end of the body and the soul and should therefore not be feared, that the gods do not reward or punish humans, that the universe is infinite and eternal, and that events in the world are ultimately based on the motions and interactions of atoms moving in empty space.
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Ernst Cassirer
Ernst Cassirer (German pronunciation: [kaˈsiːʁəʁ]; July 28, 1874 – April 13, 1945) was a German philosopher. Trained within the Neo-Kantian Marburg School, he followed his mentor Hermann Cohen in attempting to supply an idealistic philosophy of science, but after Cohen's death he developed a theory of symbolism, and used it to expand phenomenology of knowledge into a more general philosophy of culture. He is one of the leading C20th advocates of philosophical idealism.
Cassirer was born in Breslau (Wrocław), Silesia, into a Jewish family. He studied literature and philosophy at the University of Berlin. After working for many years as a Privatdozent at the Friedrich Wilhelm University in Berlin, he was elected in 1919 to the Philosophy chair at the newly-founded University of Hamburg, where he lectured until 1933, supervising amongst others the doctoral thesis of Leo Strauss. Because he was Jewish, he left Germany when the Nazis came to power.
After leaving Germany he taught for a couple of years in Oxford, before becoming a professor at Gothenburg University. When Cassirer considered Sweden too unsafe, he applied for a post at Harvard, but was rejected because thirty years earlier he had rejected a job offer from them. In 1941 he became a visiting professor at Yale University, before moving to Columbia University in New York City, where he lectured from 1943 until his death in 1945.
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Ernst Haeckel
Ernst Heinrich Philipp August Haeckel (February 16, 1834 – August 9, 1919), also written von Haeckel, was an eminent German biologist, naturalist, philosopher, physician, professor and artist who discovered, described and named thousands of new species, mapped a genealogical tree relating all life forms, and coined many terms in biology, including anthropogeny, ecology, phylum, phylogeny, stem cell, and the kingdom Protista. Haeckel promoted and popularized Charles Darwin's work in Germany and developed the controversial recapitulation theory ("ontogeny recapitulates phylogeny") claiming that an individual organism's biological development, or ontogeny, parallels and summarizes its species' evolutionary development, or phylogeny.
The published artwork of Haeckel includes over 100 detailed, multi-colour illustrations of animals and sea creatures (see: Kunstformen der Natur, "Art Forms of Nature"). As a philosopher, Ernst Haeckel wrote Die Welträtsel (1895–1899, in English, The Riddle of the Universe, 1901), the genesis for the term "world riddle" (Welträtsel); and Freedom in Science and Teaching to support teaching evolution. In the United States, Mount Haeckel, a 13,418 ft (4,090 m) summit in the Eastern Sierra Nevada, overlooking the Evolution Basin, is named in his honor, as is another Mount Haeckel, a 2,941 m (9,649 ft) summit in New Zealand; and the asteroid 12323 Haeckel. Ernst Haeckel house ("Villa Medusa") in Jena, Germany contains a historic library.
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Ernst Troeltsch
Ernst Troeltsch (17 February 1865 – 1 February 1923) was a German Protestant theologian and writer on philosophy of religion and philosophy of history, and an influential figure in German thought before 1914. His work was a synthesis of a number of strands, drawing on Albrecht Ritschl, Max Weber's conception of sociology, and the Neo-Kantians of the Baden school.
His The Social Teachings of the Christian Church (two volume edition in translation by Harper Row, 1960) is a seminal work in this area.
While religious thinking in the days of the Weimar Republic moved away from his direction, Troeltsch's work in the sociology of religion remains important.
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Eugen Ehrlich
Eugen Ehrlich (born September 14, 1862; died May 2, 1922) was an Austrian legal scholar and sociologist of law.
He was born in Czernowitz (now Chernivtsi in Ukraine), which was at that time part of the Bukovina, a province of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Ehrlich studied law in Vienna, where he taught and practised as a lawyer before returning to Czernowitz to teach at the University there, a bastion of Germanic culture at the eastern edge of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. He remained at the University for the rest of his teaching career and was Rector in 1906-7. During the turmoil of World War I, when Czernowitz was occupied several times by Russian forces, he moved to Switzerland. After the break-up of the Austro-Hungarian Empire and the ceding of the Bukovina to Romania, Ehrlich planned to return to Czernowitz, where he would have been required to teach in Romanian, but he died of diabetes in Vienna, Austria in 1922.
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Francis Bacon
Francis Bacon, 1st Viscount St Alban(s),KC (22 January 1561 – 9 April 1626) was an English philosopher, statesman, scientist, jurist and author. He served both as Attorney General and Lord Chancellor of England. Although his political career ended in disgrace, he remained extremely influential through his works, especially as philosophical advocate and practitioner of the scientific method during the scientific revolution.
Bacon has been called the creator of empiricism. His works established and popularised inductive methodologies for scientific inquiry, often called the Baconian method, or simply the scientific method. His demand for a planned procedure of investigating all things natural marked a new turn in the rhetorical and theoretical framework for science, much of which still surrounds conceptions of proper methodology today.
Bacon was knighted in 1603, and created both the Baron Verulam in 1618, and the Viscount St Alban in 1621; as he died without heirs both peerages became extinct upon his death. He famously died by contracting pneumonia while studying the effects of freezing on the preservation of meat.
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François Quesnay
François Quesnay (French pronunciation: [fʀɑ̃ˈswa kɛˈnɛ]; June 4, 1694 – December 16, 1774) was a French economist of the Physiocratic school. He is known for publishing the "Tableau économique" (Economic Table) in 1758, which provided the foundations of the ideas of the Physiocrats. This was perhaps the first work to attempt to describe the workings of the economy in an analytical way, and as such can be viewed as one of the first important contributions to economic thought.
Quesnay was born at Méré near Versailles, the son of an advocate and small landed proprietor. Apprenticed at the age of sixteen to a surgeon, he soon went to Paris, studied medicine and surgery there, and, having qualified as a master-surgeon, settled down to practice at Mantes. In 1737 he was appointed perpetual secretary of the academy of surgery founded by François Gigot de la Peyronie, and became surgeon in ordinary to the king. In 1744 he graduated as a doctor of medicine; he became physician in ordinary to the king, and afterwards his first consulting physician, and was installed in the Palace of Versailles. His apartments were on the entresol, whence the Réunions de l'entresol[clarification needed] received their name. Louis XV esteemed Quesnay highly, and used to call him his thinker; when he ennobled him he gave him for arms three flowers of the pansy (derived from pensée, in French meaning thought), with the Latin motto Propter cogitationem mentis.
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Friedrich Hayek
Friedrich August Hayek CH (German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈaʊ̯ɡʊst ˈhaɪ̯ɛk]; 8 May 1899 – 23 March 1992), born in Austria-Hungary as Friedrich August von Hayek, was an economist and philosopher best known for his defense of classical liberalism. In 1974, Hayek shared the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences (with his political rival, Gunnar Myrdal) for his "pioneering work in the theory of money and economic fluctuations and... penetrating analysis of the interdependence of economic, social and institutional phenomena." He considered the efficient allocation of capital to be the most important factor leading to sustainable and optimal GDP growth, and warned of harms from monetary authority manipulation of interest rates. Interest rates should be set naturally by equilibrium between consumption of goods or capital stock.
Hayek is considered to be a major economist and political philosopher of the twentieth century. Along with his mentor Ludwig von Mises, he was an important contributor to the Austrian school of economic thought. Hayek's account of how changing prices communicate information which enable individuals to coordinate their plans is widely regarded as an important achievement in economics. He also contributed to the fields of systems thinking, jurisprudence, neuroscience and the history of ideas.
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Friedrich Nietzsche
Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche ( /ˈniːtʃə/;German pronunciation: [ˈfʁiːdʁɪç ˈvɪlhɛlm ˈniːtsʃə]; October 15, 1844 – August 25, 1900) was a German philosopher, poet, cultural critic and classical philologist. He wrote critical texts on religion, morality, contemporary culture, philosophy and science, displaying a fondness for metaphor, irony and aphorism.
Nietzsche's influence remains substantial within and beyond philosophy, notably in existentialism, nihilism and postmodernism. His style and radical questioning of the value and objectivity of truth have resulted in much commentary and interpretation, mostly in the continental tradition. His key ideas include the death of God, the Übermensch, the eternal recurrence, the Apollonian and Dionysian dichotomy, perspectivism and the will to power. Central to his philosophy is the idea of "life-affirmation", which involves an honest questioning of all doctrines that drain life's expansive energies, however socially prevalent and radical those views might be.
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Friedrich Schiller
Johann Christoph Friedrich von Schiller [ˈjoːhan ˈkʁɪstɔf ˈfʁiːdʁɪç fɔn ˈʃɪlɐ] (10 November 1759 – 9 May 1805) was a German poet, philosopher, historian, and playwright. During the last seventeen years of his life (1788–1805), Schiller struck up a productive, if complicated, friendship with already famous and influential Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. They frequently discussed issues concerning aesthetics, and Schiller encouraged Goethe to finish works he left as sketches. This relationship and these discussions led to a period now referred to as Weimar Classicism. They also worked together on Xenien, a collection of short satirical poems in which both Schiller and Goethe challenge opponents to their philosophical vision.
Friedrich Schiller was born on 10 November 1759, in Marbach, Württemberg as the only son of military doctor Johann Kaspar Schiller (1733–96), and Elisabeth Dorothea Kodweiß (1732–1802). They also had five daughters. His father was away in the Seven Years' War when Friedrich was born. He was named after king Frederick the Great, but he was called Fritz by nearly everyone. Kaspar Schiller was rarely home during the war, but he did manage to visit the family once in a while. His wife and children also visited him occasionally wherever he happened to be stationed. When the war ended in 1763, Schiller's father became a recruiting officer and was stationed in Schwäbisch Gmünd. The family moved with him. Due to the high cost of living—especially the rent—the family moved to nearby Lorch.
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Galileo Galilei
Galileo Galilei (Italian pronunciation: [ɡaliˈlɛːo ɡaliˈlɛi]; 15 February 1564 – 8 January 1642), was an Italian physicist, mathematician, astronomer, and philosopher who played a major role in the Scientific Revolution. His achievements include improvements to the telescope and consequent astronomical observations and support for Copernicanism. Galileo has been called the "father of modern observational astronomy", the "father of modern physics", the "father of science", and "the Father of Modern Science".
His contributions to observational astronomy include the telescopic confirmation of the phases of Venus, the discovery of the four largest satellites of Jupiter (named the Galilean moons in his honour), and the observation and analysis of sunspots. Galileo also worked in applied science and technology, inventing an improved military compass and other instruments.
Galileo's championing of heliocentrism was controversial within his lifetime, when most subscribed to either geocentrism or the Tychonic system. He met with opposition from astronomers, who doubted heliocentrism due to the absence of an observed stellar parallax. The matter was investigated by the Roman Inquisition in 1615, and they concluded that it could only be supported as a possibility, not as an established fact. Galileo later defended his views in Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems, which appeared to attack Pope Urban VIII and thus alienated him and the Jesuits, who had both supported Galileo up until this point. He was tried by the Inquisition, found "vehemently suspect of heresy", forced to recant, and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. It was while Galileo was under house arrest that he wrote one of his finest works, Two New Sciences. Here he summarized the work he had done some forty years earlier, on the two sciences now called kinematics and strength of materials.
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George Berkeley
George Berkeley ( /ˈbɑrkliː/; 12 March 1685 – 14 January 1753), also known as Bishop Berkeley (Bishop of Cloyne), was an Anglo-Irish philosopher whose primary achievement was the advancement of a theory he called "immaterialism" (later referred to as "subjective idealism" by others). This theory denies the existence of material substance and instead contends that familiar objects like tables and chairs are only ideas in the minds of perceivers, and as a result cannot exist without being perceived. Thus, as Berkeley famously put it, for physical objects "esse est percipi" ("to be is to be perceived"). Berkeley is also known for his critique of abstraction, an important premise in his argument for immaterialism.
In 1709, Berkeley published his first major work, An Essay towards a New Theory of Vision, in which he discussed the limitations of human vision and advanced the theory that the proper objects of sight are not material objects, but light and color. This foreshadowed his chief philosophical work A Treatise Concerning the Principles of Human Knowledge in 1710 which, after its poor reception, he rewrote in dialogue form and published under the title Three Dialogues between Hylas and Philonous in 1713.
In this book, Berkeley's views were represented by Philonous (Greek: 'lover of mind'), while Hylas (Greek: 'matter') embodies the Irish thinker’s opponents, in particular John Locke. Berkeley argued against Sir Isaac Newton's doctrine of absolute space, time and motion in De Motu (on Motion), published 1721. His arguments were a precursor to the views of Mach and Einstein. In 1732, he published Alciphron, a Christian apologetic against the free-thinkers, and in 1734, he published The Analyst, an empiricist critique of the foundations of infinitesimal calculus, which was influential in the development of mathematics.
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George Santayana
George Santayana (born Jorge Agustín Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás in Madrid, December 16, 1863; died September 26, 1952, in Rome) was a philosopher, essayist, poet, and novelist. A lifelong Spanish citizen, Santayana was raised and educated in the United States and identified himself as an American, although he always kept a validated Spanish passport. He wrote in English and is generally considered an American man of letters. At the age of forty-eight, Santayana left his position at Harvard and returned to Europe permanently, never to return to the United States. His last will was to be buried in the Spanish Pantheon of the Cimitero Monumentale del Verano in Rome.
Santayana is known for the sayings, "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it", and "[O]nly the dead have seen the end of war." The latter sentence is often (for example, at the start of the film Blackhawk Down) falsely attributed to Plato; the former appears in Reason in Common Sense, the first volume of Santayana's five-volume Life of Reason. (In the 1905 Charles Scribner's Sons edition, it is found on page 284.) Santayana is broadly included among the pragmatists with Harvard University colleagues William James and Josiah Royce. He said that he stood in philosophy "exactly where [he stood] in daily life."
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Georges Gurvitch
Georges Gurvitch (Russian: Гео́ргий Дави́дович Гу́рвич; November 11, 1894, Novorossiysk - December 12, 1965, Paris) was a Russian born French sociologist and jurist. One of the leading sociologists of his times, he was a specialist of the sociology of knowledge. In 1944 he founded the journal Cahiers internationaux de Sociologie. He held a chair in sociology at the Sorbonne in Paris. An outspoken advocate of Algerian decolonization, Gurvitch and his wife were the victim of terrorist attack by the far-right nationalist group, L'O.A.S on June 22, 1962. Their apartment was destroyed by a bomb, and they took refuge for a time at the house of painter Marc Chagall.
Gurvitch is an important figure in the development of sociology of law. Like other legal sociologists, he insisted that law is not merely the rules or decisions produced, interpreted and enforced by asgencies of the state, such as legislatures, courts and police. Groups and communities of various kinds, whether formally structured or informally organised, produce regulation for themselves and others, which can properly be considered law from a sociological standpoint. Gurvitch's legal pluralism is, however, far more rigorous and radical than that of most legal sociologists and locates an immense variety of types of law in the various kinds of sociality - or social interaction - that he distinguished in his writings. He saw the need to stress the reality and significance of social law and social rights, in opposition to what he termed individual law. His Bill of Social Rights, drafted at the end of World War II was an attempt to state a blueprint of a legal framework of social law for a postwar world in which the idea of human rights had become newly powerful.
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Gerhard Schröder
Gerhard Fritz Kurt Schröder (commonly rendered Schroeder)([ˈɡɛɐ̯haɐ̯t fʁɪts kʊʁt ˈʃʁøːdɐ] ( listen); born 7 April 1944) is a German politician, and was Chancellor of Germany from 1998 to 2005. A member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), he led a coalition government of the SPD and the Greens. Before becoming a full-time politician, he was a lawyer, and before becoming Chancellor he served as Premier of Lower Saxony (1990–1998). Following the 2005 federal election, which his party lost, after three weeks of negotiations he stood down as Chancellor in favour of Angela Merkel of the rival Christian Democratic Union. He is currently the chairman of the board of Nord Stream AG, after having been hired as a global manager by investment bank Rothschild.
Schröder was born in Mossenberg, today an outlying centre of Blomberg, in what is now North Rhine-Westphalia. His father, Fritz Schröder, a lance corporal in the Wehrmacht, was killed in action in World War II in Romania on 4 October 1944, a few months after Gerhard's birth. His mother Erika worked as an agricultural laborer so that she could support herself and her two sons.
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Germain Grisez
Germain Gabriel Grisez (born 1929) is a Catholic moral theologian. Grisez is the author of the three-volume Way of the Lord Jesus. Grisez moves between the spheres of philosophy and theology, articulating a new form of natural law thinking, consonant with the teachings of the Roman Catholic magisterium.[citation needed]
Grisez is emeritus Professor of Christian Ethics at Mount St. Mary's University in Emmitsburg, MD.
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Germans
The Germans (Deutsche) are a Germanic ethnic group native to Central Europe. The English term Germans has referred to the German-speaking population of the Holy Roman Empire since the Late Middle Ages. Legally, Germans are citizens of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Of approximately 100 million native speakers of German in the world, about 66–75 million consider themselves Germans. There are an additional 80 million people of German ancestry mainly in the United States, Brazil, Canada, Argentina, France, Russia, Chile, Poland, Australia and Romania who most likely are not native speakers of German. Thus, the total number of Germans worldwide lies between 66 and 160 million, depending on the criteria applied (native speakers, single-ancestry ethnic Germans, partial German ancestry, etc.).
Today, peoples from countries with a German-speaking majority or significant German-speaking population groups other than Germany, such as Austria, Switzerland, Liechtenstein and Luxembourg, have developed their own national identity and usually do not refer to themselves as "Germans" in a modern context.
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Gilbert Ryle
Gilbert Ryle (19 August 1900, Brighton – 6 October 1976, Oxford), was a British philosopher, a representative of the generation of British ordinary language philosophers that shared Wittgenstein's approach to philosophical problems, and is principally known for his critique of Cartesian dualism, for which he coined the phrase "the ghost in the machine". Some of his ideas in the philosophy of mind have been referred to as "behaviourist." Ryle's best known book is The Concept of Mind (1949), in which he writes that the "general trend of this book will undoubtedly, and harmlessly, be stigmatised as 'behaviourist'." Ryle, having engaged in detailed study of the key works of Bernard Bolzano, Franz Brentano, Alexius Meinong, Edmund Husserl, and Martin Heidegger, himself suggested instead that the book "could be described as a sustained essay in phenomenology, if you are at home with that label."
Ryle was born in Brighton, England in 1900 and grew up in an environment of learning. His father was a Brighton doctor, a generalist who had interests in philosophy and astronomy, and passed on to his children an impressive library. Ryle was educated at Brighton College, and in 1919, he went up to Queen's College at Oxford, initially to study Classics but was quickly drawn to Philosophy. He would graduate with first class honours in 1924 and was appointed to a lectureship in Philosophy at Christ Church, Oxford. A year later, he was to become a tutor. Ryle remained at Christ Church until World War II.
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Giorgio Del Vecchio
Giorgio Del Vecchio (Bologna, 1878 - Genoa, 1970) was a prominent Italian legal philosopher of the early 20th century. Among others he influenced the theories of Norberto Bobbio. He is famous for his book Justice.
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Giovanni Gentile
Giovanni Gentile (Italian pronunciation: [dʒoˈvanni dʒenˈtiːle]; May 30, 1875 – April 15, 1944) was an Italian neo-Hegelian Idealist philosopher, a peer of Benedetto Croce. He described himself as 'the philosopher of Fascism', and ghostwrote A Doctrine of Fascism (1932) for Benito Mussolini. He also devised his own system of philosophy, Actual Idealism.
Giovanni Gentile was born in Castelvetrano, Sicily. He was inspired by Italian intellectuals such as Mazzini, Rosmini, Gioberti, and Spaventa from whom he borrowed the idea of autoctisi, “self-construction”, but also was strongly influenced by the German idealist and materialist schools of thought — namely Karl Marx, Hegel, and Fichte with whom he shared the ideal of creating a Wissenschaftslehre, theory for a structure of knowledge that makes no assumptions. Friedrich Nietzsche, too, influenced him, as seen in an analogy between Nietzsche's Übermensch and Gentile's Uomo Fascista.
He won the fierce competition and became one of the four exceptional students of the mythic Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa, where he enrolled at the Faculty of Humanities.
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Gustav Radbruch
Gustav Radbruch (21 November 1878 – 23 November 1949) was a German legal scholar and politician. He served as Minister of Justice of the German Empire during the early Weimar period. Radbruch is also regarded as one of the most influential legal philosophers of the 20th century.
Born at Lübeck, Radbruch studied law in Munich, Leipzig and Berlin. He passed his first bar exam ("Staatsexamen") in Berlin in 1901, and the following year he received his doctorate with a dissertation on "The Theory of adequate causation." This was followed in 1903 by his qualification to teach criminal law in Heidelberg. In 1904, he was appointed Professor of criminal and trial law and legal philosophy in Heidelberg. In 1914 he accepted a call to a professorship in Königsberg, and in 1914 he accepted one at Kiel.
Radbruch was a member of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), and held a seat in the Reichstag from 1920 to 1924. In 1921-22 and throughout 1923, he was minister of justice in the cabinets of Joseph Wirth and Gustav Stresemann. During his time in office, a number of important laws were implemented, such as those giving women access to the justice system, and, after the assassination of Walter Rathenau, the law for the protection of the republic.
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Guy Debord
Guy Ernest Debord (December 28, 1931 – November 30, 1994) was a French Marxist theorist, writer, filmmaker, member of the Letterist International, founder of a Letterist faction, and founding member of the Situationist International (SI). He was also briefly a member of Socialisme ou Barbarie.
Guy Debord was born in Paris in 1931. Guy's father, Martial, was a pharmacist who died due to illness when Guy was young. Guy's mother, Paulette Rossi, sent Guy to live with his grandmother in her family villa in Italy. During World War II, the Rossis left the villa and began to travel from town to town. As a result, Guy attended high school in Cannes, where he began his interest in film and vandalism. As a young man, Debord actively opposed the French war in Algeria and joined in demonstrations in Paris against it.
Debord joined the Letterist International when he was 19. The Letterists were led dictatorially by Isidore Isou until a widely agreed upon schism ended Isou's authority. This schism birthed several factions of Letterists, one of which was decidedly led by Debord upon Gil Wolman's unequivocal recommendation. In the 1960s, Debord led the Situationist International group, which influenced the Paris Uprising of 1968. Some consider his book The Society of the Spectacle (1967) to be a catalyst for the uprising.
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György Lukács
György Lukács ( /ˈluːkɑːtʃ/; Hungarian pronunciation: [ˌɟørɟ ˈlukaːtʃ]; (13 April 1885 – 4 June 1971) was a Hungarian philosopher, æsthetician, literary historan, critic, and Marxist. He was the founder of Western Marxism, the interpretive tradition that departed from the Marxist ideologic orthodoxy of the USSR; as such, he developed the theory of reification, and contributed to Marxist theory with developments of the class consciousness theory by Karl Marx. As a literary critic György Lukács was especially influential, because of his theoretical developments of realism and of the novel as a literary genre. In 1919, he was the Hungarian Minister of Culture of the government of the short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic (March–August 1919).
Georg Lukács was born Löwinger György Bernát, in Budapest Hungary, to the investment banker József Löwinger (later Szegedi Lukács József; 1855–1928) and his wife Adele Wertheimer (Wertheimer Adél; 1860–1917), who were a wealthy Jewish family. As an Austro–Hungarian subject, the full names of Georg Lukács were the German Georg Bernhard Lukács von Szegedin, and the Hungarian Szegedi Lukács György Bernát; as a writer, he published under the names Georg Lukács and György Lukács. As a student, Georg Lukács studied at the universities of Budapest and Berlin, and received his doctorate in 1906 in Kolozsvár.
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Han Fei
Han Fei (Chinese: 韓非; pinyin: Hán Fēi; Wade–Giles: Han Fei; ca. 280–233 BC), also known as Han Feizi, was a Chinese philosopher who, along with Li Si, Gongsun Yang, Shen Dao and Shen Buhai, developed the doctrine of Legalism. Unlike the other famed philosophers of the time, Han Fei was a member of the ruling aristocracy, having been born into the ruling family of the state of Han during the end phase of the Warring States Period. In this context, his works have been interpreted by some scholars as being directed to his cousin, the King of Han.
Han Fei is his name, while zi (子, meaning "Master") was often added to philosophers' names as an honorific—such as Kong Fuzi (孔夫子) for Confucius—thus Han Feizi (韓非子) can denote the book written by him, but is also used in reference to the person himself.
Han Fei belonged to the school of Ancient Chinese Philosophy called Legalism. Legalism assumed that people were naturally evil and always acted to avoid punishment while simultaneously trying to achieve gains; Thus, the law must severely punish any unwanted action, while at the same time reward those who follow it. Han Fei Synthesized the ideas of Shang Yang, Shen Buhai, and Shen Dao, while borrowing Shang Yang's emphasis on laws, Shen Buhai's emphasis on techniques, and Shen Dao's ideas on authority and prophecy. Hen Fei's interpretation of Legalism stressed that the autocrat will be able achieve the ultimate ends of Legalist philosophy of firmly control the state with the mastering of three concepts: his position of power (勢, Shì); certain techniques (術, Shù), and laws (法, Fǎ) as described in his classic work, the Han Feizi (book).
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Hannah Arendt
Johanna “Hannah” Arendt (October 14, 1906 – December 4, 1975) was a German American political theorist. She has often been described as a philosopher, although she refused that label on the grounds that philosophy is concerned with "man in the singular." She described herself instead as a political theorist because her work centers on the fact that "men, not Man, live on the earth and inhabit the world". Arendt's work deals with the nature of power, and the subjects of politics, authority, and totalitarianism.
Arendt was born into a family of secular German Jews in the city of Linden (now part of Hanover), and grew up in Königsberg (the birthplace of Prussian philosopher Immanuel Kant, renamed as Kaliningrad and annexed to the Soviet Union in 1946) and Berlin.
At the University of Marburg, she studied philosophy with Martin Heidegger. According to Hans Jonas, her only German-Jewish classmate, Arendt embarked on a long and stormy romantic relationship with Heidegger, for which she was later criticized because of Heidegger's support for the Nazi party when he was rector of Freiburg University.
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Hans Kelsen
Hans Kelsen (October 11, 1881 – April 19, 1973) was a jurist and legal philosopher. He has been regarded as one of the most important legal scholars of the 20th century.
Kelsen was born in Prague to Jewish parents. He moved to Vienna with his family when he was three years old. Having graduated from the Akademisches Gymnasium, he studied law at the University of Vienna, taking his doctorate in 1906. In 1911, he achieved his habilitation (license to hold university lectures) in public law and legal philosophy and published his first major work, Main Problems in the Theory of Public Law (Hauptprobleme der Staatsrechtslehre).
In 1912, Kelsen married Margarete Bondi, and the couple had two daughters.
In 1919, he became full professor of public and administrative law at the University of Vienna. He established and edited the Journal of Public Law (Zeitschrift für öffentliches Recht) in Vienna. At the behest of Chancellor Karl Renner, Kelsen worked on drafting a new Austrian Constitution, enacted in 1920. The document still forms the basis of Austrian constitutional law. Kelsen was appointed to the Constitutional Court, for a life term. In 1925, he published General Theory of the State (Allgemeine Staatslehre) in Berlin.
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Hans Köchler
Hans Köchler (born October 18, 1948 in Schwaz, Tyrol, Austria) is a professor of philosophy at the University of Innsbruck, Austria, and president of the International Progress Organization, a non-governmental organization in consultative status with the United Nations. In his general philosophical outlook he is influenced by Husserl and Heidegger, his legal thinking has been shaped by the approach of Kelsen. Köchler has made major contributions to phenomenology and philosophical anthropology and has developed a hermeneutics of trans-cultural understanding that has influenced the discourse on the dialogue of civilizations (a term which he used for the first time in 1972), particularly as regards the relations between Islam and the West. His research in political and legal philosophy—combined with his involvement with the UN—has resulted in a fundamental critique of the state-centered international system and in specific proposals for the democratization of the United Nations Organization and for a viable system of international criminal justice.
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Harald Høffding
Harald Høffding (11 March 1843 – 2 July 1931) was a Danish philosopher.
Born and educated in Copenhagen, he became a schoolmaster, and ultimately in 1883 a professor at the University of Copenhagen.[citation needed] He was strongly influenced by Søren Kierkegaard in his early development, but later became a positivist, retaining and combining with it the spirit and method of practical psychology and the critical school.[citation needed] The physicist Niels Bohr studied philosophy from and became a friend of Høffding.[citation needed]
Høffding died in Copenhagen.[citation needed]
His best-known work is perhaps his Den nyere Filosofis Historie (1894), translated into English from the German edition (1895) by B.E. Meyer as History of Modern Philosophy (2 vols., 1900), a work intended by him to supplement and correct that of Hans Brøchner, to whom it is dedicated. His Psychology, the Problems of Philosophy (1905) and Philosophy of Religion (1906) also have appeared in English.
Among Høffding's other writings, practically all of which have been translated into German, are: Den engelske Filosofi i vor Tid (1874); Etik (1876); Psychologi i Omrids paa Grundlag af Erfaring (ed. 1892); Psykologiske Undersøgelser (1889); Charles Darwin (1889); Kontinuiteten i Kants filosofiske Udviklingsgang (1893); Det psykologiske Grundlag for logiske Domme (1899); Rousseau und seine Philosophie (1901); Mindre Arbejder (1899).
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Henri Bergson
Henri-Louis Bergson (French pronunciation: [bɛʁksɔn] 18 October 1859 – 4 January 1941) was a major French philosopher, influential especially in the first half of the 20th century. Bergson convinced many thinkers that immediate experience and intuition are more significant than rationalism and science for understanding reality.
He was awarded the 1927 Nobel Prize in Literature "in recognition of his rich and vitalizing ideas and the brilliant skill with which they have been presented".
Bergson was born in the Rue Lamartine in Paris, not far from the Palais Garnier (the old Paris opera house) in 1859 (the year in which France emerged as a victor in the Second Italian War of Independence, and in the month before the publication of Charles Darwin's On the Origin of Species). His father, the pianist Michał Bergson, was of a Polish Jewish family background (originally bearing the name Bereksohn). His mother, Katherine Levison, daughter of a Yorkshire doctor, was from an English and Irish Jewish background. The Bereksohns were a famous[citation needed] Jewish entrepreneurial family of Polish descent. Henri Bergson's great-great-grandfather, Szmul Jakubowicz Sonnenberg, called Zbytkower, was a prominent banker and a protégé of Stanisław August Poniatowski, King of Poland from 1764 to 1795.
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Henri Poincaré
Jules Henri Poincaré (29 April 1854 – 17 July 1912) (French pronunciation: [ˈʒyl ɑ̃ˈʁi pwɛ̃nkaˈʁe]) was a French mathematician, theoretical physicist, engineer, and a philosopher of science. He is often described as a polymath, and in mathematics as The Last Universalist, since he excelled in all fields of the discipline as it existed during his lifetime.
As a mathematician and physicist, he made many original fundamental contributions to pure and applied mathematics, mathematical physics, and celestial mechanics. He was responsible for formulating the Poincaré conjecture, which was one of the most famous unsolved problems in mathematics until it was solved in 2002–2003. In his research on the three-body problem, Poincaré became the first person to discover a chaotic deterministic system which laid the foundations of modern chaos theory. He is also considered to be one of the founders of the field of topology.
Poincaré made clear importance of paying attention to the invariance of laws of physics under different transformations, and was the first to present the Lorentz transformations in their modern symmetrical form. Poincaré discovered the remaining relativistic velocity transformations and recorded them in a letter to Dutch physicist Hendrik Lorentz (1853–1928) in 1905. Thus he obtained perfect invariance of all of Maxwell's equations, an important step in the formulation of the theory of special relativity.
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Henry David Thoreau
Henry David Thoreau (July 12, 1817 – May 6, 1862) was an American author, poet, philosopher, abolitionist, naturalist, tax resister, development critic, surveyor, historian, and leading transcendentalist. He is best known for his book Walden, a reflection upon simple living in natural surroundings, and his essay Civil Disobedience, an argument for individual resistance to civil government in moral opposition to an unjust state.
Thoreau's books, articles, essays, journals, and poetry total over 20 volumes. Among his lasting contributions were his writings on natural history and philosophy, where he anticipated the methods and findings of ecology and environmental history, two sources of modern day environmentalism. His literary style interweaves close natural observation, personal experience, pointed rhetoric, symbolic meanings, and historical lore, while displaying a poetic sensibility, philosophical austerity, and "Yankee" love of practical detail. He was also deeply interested in the idea of survival in the face of hostile elements, historical change, and natural decay; at the same time he advocated abandoning waste and illusion in order to discover life's true essential needs.
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Henry Sidgwick
Henry Sidgwick (31 May 1838 – 28 August 1900) was an English utilitarian philosopher and economist. He was one of the founders and first president of the Society for Psychical Research, a member of the Metaphysical Society, and promoted the higher education of women. His work in economics has also had a lasting influence.
He was born at Skipton in Yorkshire, where his father, the Reverend W. Sidgwick (d. 1841), was headmaster of the local grammar school, Ermysted's Grammar School. Henry himself was educated at Rugby (where his cousin, subsequently his brother-in-law, Edward White Benson – later Archbishop of Canterbury – was a master), and at Trinity College, Cambridge. While at Trinity, Sidgwick became a member of the Cambridge Apostles. In 1859 he was senior classic, 33rd wrangler, chancellor's medallist and Craven scholar. In the same year he was elected to a fellowship at Trinity, and soon afterwards became a lecturer in classics there, a post he held for ten years.
In 1869, he exchanged his lectureship for one in moral philosophy, a subject to which he had been turning his attention. In the same year, deciding that he could no longer in good conscience declare himself a member of the Church of England, he resigned his fellowship. He retained his lectureship, and in 1881 was elected an honorary fellow. In 1874 he published The Methods of Ethics (6th ed. 1901, containing emendations written just before his death), by common consent a major work, which made his reputation outside the university. John Rawls called it the "first truly academic work in moral theory, modern in both method and spirit."
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Heraclitus
Heraclitus of Ephesus (Ancient Greek: Ἡράκλειτος ὁ Ἐφέσιος—Hērákleitos ho Ephésios; c. 535 – c. 475 BCE) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, a native of the Greek city Ephesus, Ionia, on the coast of Asia Minor. He was of distinguished parentage. Little is known about his early life and education, but he regarded himself as self-taught and a pioneer of wisdom. From the lonely life he led, and still more from the riddling nature of his philosophy and his contempt for humankind in general, he was called "The Obscure" and the "Weeping Philosopher".
Heraclitus is famous for his insistence on ever-present change in the universe, as stated in the famous saying, "No man ever steps in the same river twice" (see panta rhei, below). He believed in the unity of opposites, stating that "the path up and down are one and the same", all existing entities being characterized by pairs of contrary properties. His cryptic utterance that "all entities come to be in accordance with this Logos" (literally, "word", "reason", or "account") has been the subject of numerous interpretations.
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Herbert Spencer
Herbert Spencer (27 April 1820 – 8 December 1903) was an English philosopher, biologist, sociologist, and prominent classical liberal political theorist of the Victorian era.
Spencer developed an all-embracing conception of evolution as the progressive development of the physical world, biological organisms, the human mind, and human culture and societies. He was "an enthusiastic exponent of evolution" and even "wrote about evolution before Darwin did." As a polymath, he contributed to a wide range of subjects, including ethics, religion, anthropology, economics, political theory, philosophy, biology, sociology, and psychology. During his lifetime he achieved tremendous authority, mainly in English-speaking academia. "The only other English philosopher to have achieved anything like such widespread popularity was Bertrand Russell, and that was in the 20th century." Spencer was "the single most famous European intellectual in the closing decades of the nineteenth century" but his influence declined sharply after 1900; "Who now reads Spencer?" asked Talcott Parsons in 1937.
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Hermann Cohen
Hermann Cohen (4 July 1842 – 4 April 1918) was a German-Jewish philosopher, one of the founders of the Marburg School of Neo-Kantianism, and he is often held to be "probably the most important Jewish philosopher of the nineteenth century".
Cohen was born in Coswig, Anhalt. He early began to study philosophy, and soon became known as a profound student of Kant. He was educated at the Gymnasium at Dessau, at the Jewish Theological Seminary of Breslau, and at the universities of Breslau, Berlin, and Halle. In 1873, he became Privatdozent in the philosophical faculty of the University of Marburg, the thesis with which he obtained the venia legendi being Die systematischen Begriffe in Kant's vorkritischen Schriften nach ihrem Verhältniss zum kritischen Idealismus. In 1875, Cohen was elected ao. Professor, and in the following o. Professor (see Professor - Germany), at Marburg.
He was one of the founders of the "Gesellschaft zur Förderung der Wissenschaft des Judenthums", which held its first meeting in Berlin in November 1902.
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Hilaire Belloc
Joseph Hilaire Pierre René Belloc (/hɨˈlɛər ˈbɛlək/; French: [ilɛʁ bɛlɔk]; 27 July 1870 – 16 July 1953) was an Anglo-French writer and historian who became a naturalised British subject in 1902. He was one of the most prolific writers in England during the early twentieth century. He was known as a writer, orator, poet, satirist, man of letters, and political activist. He is most notable for his Catholic faith, which had a strong impact on most of his works and his writing collaboration with G. K. Chesterton. He was President of the Oxford Union and later MP for Salford from 1906 to 1910. He was a noted disputant, with a number of long-running feuds, but also widely regarded as a humane and sympathetic man.
His most lasting legacy is probably his verse, which encompasses cautionary tales and religious poetry. Among his best-remembered poems are Jim, who ran away from his nurse, and was eaten by a lion and Matilda, who told lies and was burnt to death"'
Recent biographies of Belloc have been written by A. N. Wilson and Joseph Pearce.
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Hilary Putnam
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.
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Hubert Dreyfus
Hubert Lederer Dreyfus (born October 15, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley.
His main interests include phenomenology, existentialism and the philosophy of both psychology and literature, as well as the philosophical implications of artificial intelligence. Dreyfus is known for his exegesis of Martin Heidegger.
Born in Terre Haute, Indiana to Stanley S. and Irene Lederer Dreyfus, Dreyfus was educated at Harvard University, earning three degrees there, with a BA in 1951, an MA in 1952, and a PhD in 1964, under the supervision of Dagfinn Føllesdal. He is considered a leading interpreter of the work of Edmund Husserl, Michel Foucault, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, but especially of Martin Heidegger. His Being-in-the-World: A Commentary on Heidegger's "Being and Time," Division 1, is thought by many who have attempted to teach Heidegger to undergraduates to be the authoritative text on Heidegger's most significant contribution to philosophy. He also co-authored Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, translated Merleau-Ponty's Sense and Non-Sense, and authored the controversial 1972 book What Computers Can't Do, revised first in 1979, and then again in 1992 with a new introduction as What Computers Still Can't Do. While spending most of his teaching career at Berkeley, Professor Dreyfus has also taught at Brandeis University (1957 to 1959), the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (from 1960 to 1968), the University of Frankfurt, and Hamilton College. His philosophical work has influenced Richard Rorty, Charles Taylor, John Searle, and his former student John Haugeland, among others. His critical comments on the existential phenomenology and subsequent dialectical philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre may well have played a significant role in the demise of Sartre's influence on recent thought.
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Hugh of Saint Victor
Hugh of Saint Victor (c. 1096 – 11 February 1141) was born perhaps in France, or more probably in Saxony. His origins and early life are rather obscure. He studied and taught at the Augustinian Abbey of Saint Victor in Paris after which he is named. His writings include works of theology, mysticism, philosophy and the arts. Appointed a canon of the Victorines around the turn of the twelfth century.
The early Didascalion was an elementary, encyclopedic approach to God and Christ, in which Hugh avoided controversial subjects and focused on what he took to be commonplaces of Catholic Christianity. In it he outlined three types of philosophy or "science" [scientia] that can help mortals improve themselves and advance toward God: theoretical philosophy (theology, mathematics, physics) provides them with truth, practical philosophy (ethics, economics, politics) aids them in becoming virtuous and prudent, and "mechanical" or "illiberal" philosophy (e.g., carpentry, agriculture, medicine) yields physical benefits. A fourth philosophy, logic, is preparatory to the others and exists to ensure clear and proper conclusions in them. Hugh's deeply mystical bent did not prevent him from seeing philosophy as a useful tool for understanding the divine, or from using it to argue on behalf of faith.
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Hugo Grotius
Hugo Grotius (10 April 1583 – 28 August 1645), also known as Huig de Groot, Hugo Grocio or Hugo de Groot, was a jurist in the Dutch Republic. With Francisco de Vitoria and Alberico Gentili he laid the foundations for international law, based on natural law. He was also a philosopher, theologian, Christian apologist, playwright, and poet.
Grotius's influence on international law is paramount, and is acknowledged by, for instance, the American Society of International Law, which since 1999 holds an annual series of Grotius Lectures. Additionally, his contributions to Arminian theology provided the seeds for later Arminian-based movements, such as Methodism and Pentecostalism and he is acknowledged as a significant figure in the Arminianism-Calvinism debate.
Born in Delft during the Dutch Revolt, Hugo was the first child of Jan de Groot and Alida van Overschie. His father was a man of learning, once having studied with the eminent Justus Lipsius at Leiden, as well as of political distinction, and he groomed his son from an early age in a traditional humanist and Aristotelian education. A prodigious learner, Hugo entered the University of Leiden when he was just eleven years old. There he studied with some of the most acclaimed intellectuals in northern Europe, including Franciscus Junius, Joseph Justus Scaliger, and Rudolph Snellius. At age sixteen he published his first book: a scholarly edition of the late antique author Martianus Capella's work on the seven liberal arts, Martiani Minei Felicis Capellæ Carthaginiensis viri proconsularis Satyricon, in quo De nuptiis Philologiæ & Mercurij libri duo, & De septem artibus liberalibus libri singulares. Omnes, & emendati, & Notis, siue Februis Hug. Grotii illustrati.
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Immanuel Kant
Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century. At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781), aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
He stated:
Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.
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Imre Lakatos
Imre Lakatos (November 9, 1922 – February 2, 1974) was a Hungarian philosopher of mathematics and science, known for his thesis of the fallibility of mathematics and its 'methodology of proofs and refutations' in its pre-axiomatic stages of development, and also for introducing the concept of the 'research programme' in his methodology of scientific research programmes.
Lakatos was born Imre (Avrum) Lipschitz to a Jewish family in Debrecen, Hungary in 1922. He received a degree in mathematics, physics, and philosophy from the University of Debrecen in 1944. He avoided Nazi persecution of Jews by changing his name to Imre Molnár. His mother and grandmother died in Auschwitz. He became an active communist during the Second World War. He changed his last name once again to Lakatos (Locksmith) in honor of Géza Lakatos.
After the war, from 1947 he worked as a senior official in the Hungarian ministry of education. He also continued his education with a PhD at Debrecen University awarded in 1948, and also attended György Lukács's weekly Wednesday afternoon private seminars. He also studied at the Moscow State University under the supervision of Sofya Yanovskaya in 1949. When he returned, however, he found himself on the losing side of internal arguments within the Hungarian communist party and was imprisoned on charges of revisionism from 1950 to 1953. More of Lakatos' activities in Hungary after World War II have recently become known.
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Irving Singer
Irving Singer is a professor of philosophy at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. He is the author of numerous books on a diverse range of topics, but his major interests are cinema, love, sexuality, and the philosophy of George Santayana. Among his cinematic interests, he has given particular attention to the work of film directors Ingmar Bergman, Alfred Hitchcock, Jean Renoir, and Orson Welles. Singer has been publishing on philosophy since 1951.
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Isaac Newton
Sir Isaac Newton PRS MP (25 December 1642 – 20 March 1727 [NS: 4 January 1643 – 31 March 1727]) was an English physicist, mathematician, astronomer, natural philosopher, alchemist, and theologian, who has been "considered by many to be the greatest and most influential scientist who ever lived." His monograph Philosophiæ Naturalis Principia Mathematica, published in 1687, lays the foundations for most of classical mechanics. In this work, Newton described universal gravitation and the three laws of motion, which dominated the scientific view of the physical universe for the next three centuries. Newton showed that the motions of objects on Earth and of celestial bodies are governed by the same set of natural laws, by demonstrating the consistency between Kepler's laws of planetary motion and his theory of gravitation, thus removing the last doubts about heliocentrism and advancing the Scientific Revolution.
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Isaiah Berlin
Sir Isaiah Berlin OM, FBA (6 June 1909 – 5 November 1997) was a British social and political theorist, philosopher and historian of ideas of Russian-Jewish origin, thought by many to be the dominant scholar of his generation. He excelled as an essayist, conversationalist and raconteur; and as a brilliant lecturer who improvised, rapidly and spontaneously, richly allusive and coherently structured material. He translated works by Ivan Turgenev from Russian into English and, during the war, worked for the British Diplomatic Service. In its obituary of the scholar, The Independent stated that "Isaiah Berlin was often described, especially in his old age, by means of superlatives: the world's greatest talker, the century's most inspired reader, one of the finest minds of our time ... there is no doubt that he showed in more than one direction the unexpectedly large possibilities open to us at the top end of the range of human potential".
In 1932, at the age of 23, he was elected to a prize fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford. From 1957 to 1967, he was Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at the University of Oxford. He was president of the Aristotelian Society from 1963 to 1964. In 1966, he played a crucial role in founding Wolfson College, Oxford, and became its first President. He was knighted in 1957, and was awarded the Order of Merit in 1971. He was President of the British Academy from 1974 to 1978. He also received the 1979 Jerusalem Prize for his writings on individual freedom. The annual Isaiah Berlin Lectures are held at the Hampstead Synagogue and both Wolfson College and the British Academy each summer. Berlin's work on liberal theory and on value pluralism has had a lasting influence.
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Jacques Maritain
Jacques Maritain (18 November 1882 – 28 April 1973) was a French Catholic philosopher. Raised as a Protestant, he converted to Catholicism in 1906. An author of more than 60 books, he helped to revive St. Thomas Aquinas for modern times and is a prominent drafter of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Pope Paul VI presented his "Message to Men of Thought and of Science" at the close of Vatican II to Maritain, his long-time friend and mentor. Maritain's interest and works spanned many aspects of philosophy, including aesthetics, political theory, the philosophy of science, metaphysics, education, liturgy and ecclesiology.
Maritain was born in Paris, the son of Paul Maritain, who was a lawyer, and his wife Geneviève Favre, the daughter of Jules Favre, and was reared in a liberal Protestant milieu. He was sent to the Lycée Henri-IV. Later, he attended the Sorbonne, studying the natural sciences; chemistry, biology and physics.
At the Sorbonne, he met Raïssa Oumançoff, a Russian Jewish émigré. They married in 1904. A noted poet and mystic, she participated as his intellectual partner in his search for truth. Raissa's sister, Vera Oumançoff, lived with Jacques and Raissa for almost all their married life.
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Jakob Sigismund Beck
Jakob Sigismund Beck (6 August 1761 – 29 August 1840), German philosopher, was born in the village of Ließau in the rural district of Marienburg (Malbork) in West Prussia in 1761, at that time belonging to the Polish-Lithuanian province of Royal Prussia.
Since 1783 the son of a priest (of Ließau) studied mathematics and philosophy at Königsberg, where Christian Jakob Kraus, Johann Schultz (1739–1805) and Immanuel Kant had been his teachers. After his studies he first accepted a post as a teacher at a grammar school in Halle. With his thesis Dissertatio de Theoremate Tayloriano, sive de lege generali, secundum quam functionis mutantur, notatis a quibus pendent variabilibus, which he wrote in Halle, he qualified himself as a university lecturer. He then worked as a lecturer of philosophy at Halle (1791–1799), before be became a professor of philosophy at Rostock. He devoted himself to criticism and explanation of the doctrine of Kant, and in 1793 published the Erläuternder Auszug aus den kritischen Schriften des Herrn Prof. Kant, auf Anrathen desselben (Riga, 1793–1796), which has been widely used as a compendium of Kantian doctrine.
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James Boswell
James Boswell, 9th Laird of Auchinleck (29 October 1740 – 19 May 1795) was a lawyer, diarist, and author born in Edinburgh, Scotland; he is best known for the biography he wrote of one of his contemporaries, the English literary figure Samuel Johnson, which contemporary Johnsonian critic Harold Bloom has claimed is the greatest biography written in the English language.
Boswell's surname has passed into the English language as a term (Boswell, Boswellian, Boswellism) for a constant companion and observer, especially one who records those observations in print. In A Scandal in Bohemia, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle's character Sherlock Holmes affectionately says of Dr. Watson, who narrates the tales, "I am lost without my Boswell."
Boswell was born near St Giles' Cathedral in Edinburgh on 29 October 1740. He was the eldest son of a judge, Alexander Boswell, Lord Auchinleck and his wife Euphemia Erskine; he inherited his father’s estate Auchinleck in Ayrshire. Boswell's mother was a strict Calvinist, and he felt that his father was cold to him. As a child, he was delicate and suffered from some type of nervous ailment which appeared to be inherent and would afflict him sporadically all through his life. At the age of five, he was sent to James Mundell's academy, an advanced institution by the standards of the time, where he was instructed in English, Latin, writing and arithmetic. Boswell was unhappy there, and his sickliness began to manifest itself in the physical indicants associated with night fears and extreme shyness.
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James Madison
James Madison, Jr. (March 16, 1751 (O.S. March 5) – June 28, 1836) was an American statesman and political theorist, the fourth President of the United States (1809–1817). He is hailed as the “Father of the Constitution” for being instrumental in the drafting of the United States Constitution and as the key champion and author of the United States Bill of Rights. He served as a politician much of his adult life. Like other Virginia statesmen in the slave society, he was a slaveholder and part of the élite; he inherited his plantation known as Montpelier, and owned hundreds of slaves during his lifetime to cultivate tobacco and other crops.
After the constitution had been drafted, Madison became one of the leaders in the movement to ratify it. His collaboration with Alexander Hamilton and John Jay produced the Federalist Papers (1788). Circulated only in New York at the time, they would later be considered among the most important polemics in support of the Constitution. He was also a delegate to the Virginia constitutional ratifying convention, and was instrumental to the successful ratification effort in Virginia. Like most of his contemporaries, Madison changed his political views during his life. During the drafting and ratification of the constitution, he favored a strong national government, though later he grew to favor stronger state governments, before settling between the two extremes late in his life.
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Jean Baudrillard
Jean Baudrillard (27 July 1929 – 6 March 2007) (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ bodʁijaʁ]) was a French sociologist, philosopher, cultural theorist, political commentator, and photographer. His work is frequently associated with postmodernism and specifically post-structuralism.
Baudrillard was born in Reims, northeastern France, on July 27, 1929. He told interviewers that his grandparents were peasants and his parents were civil servants. During his high school studies at the Reims Lycée, he came into contact with pataphysics (via the philosophy professor Emmanuel Peillet), which is said to be crucial for understanding Baudrillard's later thought. He became the first of his family to attend university when he moved to Paris to attend Sorbonne University. There he studied German language and literature, which led to him to begin teaching the subject at several different lycées, both Parisian and provincial, from 1960 until 1966. While teaching, Baudrillard began to publish reviews of literature and translated the works of such authors as Peter Weiss, Bertolt Brecht, Karl Marx, Friedrich Engels, and Wilhelm Emil Mühlmann.
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Jean Piaget
Jean Piaget (French pronunciation: [ʒɑ̃ pjaʒɛ]; 9 August 1896 – 16 September 1980) was a French-speaking Swiss developmental psychologist and philosopher known for his epistemological studies with children. He was the eldest son of Arthur Piaget (Swiss) and Rebecca Jackson (French). His theory of cognitive development and epistemological view are together called "genetic epistemology".
Piaget placed great importance on the education of children. As the Director of the International Bureau of Education, he declared in 1934 that "only education is capable of saving our societies from possible collapse, whether violent, or gradual."
Piaget created the International Center for Genetic Epistemology in Geneva in 1955 and directed it until 1980. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is "the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing."
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Jeremy Bentham
Jeremy Bentham ( /ˈbɛnθəm/; 15 February 1748 – 6 June 1832) was an English author, jurist, philosopher, and legal and social reformer. He became a leading theorist in Anglo-American philosophy of law, and a political radical whose ideas influenced the development of welfarism. He is best known for his advocacy of utilitarianism and animal rights, and the idea of the panopticon.
His position included arguments in favour of individual and economic freedom, usury, the separation of church and state, freedom of expression, equal rights for women, the right to divorce, and the decriminalising of homosexual acts. He argued for the abolition of slavery and the death penalty and for the abolition of physical punishment, including that of children. Although strongly in favour of the extension of individual legal rights, he opposed the idea of natural law and natural rights, calling them "nonsense upon stilts."
He has come to be considered the founding figure of modern utilitarianism, through his own work and that of his students. These included his secretary and collaborator on the utilitarian school of philosophy, James Mill; James Mill's son John Stuart Mill; John Austin, legal philosopher; and several political leaders, including Robert Owen, a founder of modern socialism. He has been described as the "spiritual founder" of University College London (UCL), though he played little direct part in its foundation.
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Jeremy Waldron
Jeremy Waldron (born 13 October 1953, New Zealand) is professor of law and philosophy at the New York University School of Law and Chichele Professor of Social and Political Theory at All Souls College, Oxford University. Waldron also holds an adjunct professorship at Victoria University.
Waldron holds a B.A. (1974) and an LL.B. (1978) from the University of Otago, New Zealand, and a D.Phil. (1986) from Oxford University, where he studied under legal philosopher Ronald Dworkin and political theorist Alan Ryan. He also taught legal and political philosophy at Otago (1975–78), Lincoln College, Oxford (1980–82), the University of Edinburgh, Scotland (1983–87), the Jurisprudence and Social Policy Program at Boalt Hall School of Law at Berkeley (1986–96), Princeton University (1996–97), and Columbia Law School (1997–2006). He has also been a visiting professor at Cornell (1989–90), Otago (1991–92) and Columbia (1995) Universities.
Waldron gave the second series of Seeley Lectures at Cambridge University in 1996, the 1999 Carlyle Lectures at Oxford, the spring 2000 University Lecture at Columbia Law School, the Wesson Lectures at Stanford University in 2004, and the Storrs Lectures at Yale Law School in 2007. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1998.
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Joel Feinberg
Joel Feinberg (October 19, 1926, Detroit, Michigan - March 29, 2004, Tucson, Arizona) was an American political and social philosopher. He is known for his work in the fields of ethics, action theory, philosophy of law, and political philosophy as well as individual rights and the authority of the state. Feinberg helped in shaping the American legal landscape.
Feinberg studied at the University of Michigan, writing his dissertation on the philosophy of the Harvard professor Ralph Barton Perry under the supervision of Charles Stevenson. He taught at Brown University, Princeton University, UCLA and Rockefeller University, and at the University of Arizona, where he retired in 1994 as Regents Professor of Philosophy and Law.
Feinberg was internationally distinguished for his research in moral, social and legal philosophy. His major four volume work, The Moral Limits of Criminal Law, was published between 1984 and 1988. Feinberg held many major fellowships during his career and lectured by invitation at universities around the world. He was an esteemed and highly successful teacher, and many of his students are now prominent scholars and professors at universities across the US.
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Johann Georg Hamann
Johann Georg Hamann (27 August 1730, Königsberg – 21 June 1788, Münster) was a noted German philosopher, a main proponent of the Sturm und Drang movement, and associated by historian of ideas Isaiah Berlin with the Counter-Enlightenment.
He was destined for the pulpit, but became a clerk in a mercantile house, and afterward held many small public offices, devoting his leisure to study. He wrote under the nom de plume of “the Magus of the North” (German: Magus im Norden).
His distrust of reason and the Enlightenment (“I look upon logical proofs the way a well-bred girl looks upon a love letter” was one of his many witticisms) led him to conclude that faith in God was the only solution to the vexing problems of philosophy.
Hamann was a Pietist Lutheran, and a friend (while being an intellectual opponent) of the philosopher Immanuel Kant. He was greatly influenced by David Hume. This is most evident in Hamann's conviction that faith and belief, rather than knowledge, determine human actions. Also, Hamann asserted that the efficacy of a concept arises from the habits it reflects rather than any inherent quality it possesses. Hamann famously used the image of Socrates, who often proclaimed to know nothing, in his Socratic Memorabilia, an essay in which Hamann critiques the Enlightenment's dependence on reason.
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John Dewey
John Dewey (October 20, 1859 – June 1, 1952) was an American philosopher, psychologist and educational reformer whose ideas have been influential in education and social reform. Dewey was an important early developer of the philosophy of pragmatism and one of the founders of functional psychology. He was a major representative of progressive education and liberalism.
Although Dewey is known best for his publications concerning education, he also wrote about many other topics, including experience, nature, art, logic, inquiry, democracy, and ethics.
In his advocacy of democracy, Dewey considered two fundamental elements—schools and civil society—as being major topics needing attention and reconstruction to encourage experimental intelligence and plurality. Dewey asserted that complete democracy was to be obtained not just by extending voting rights but also by ensuring that there exists a fully formed public opinion, accomplished by effective communication among citizens, experts, and politicians, with the latter being accountable for the policies they adopt.[citation needed]
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John Finnis
John Mitchell Finnis (born 28 July 1940), is an Australian legal scholar and philosopher, specialising in the philosophy of law. He is Professor of Law at University College, Oxford and at the University of Notre Dame, teaching jurisprudence, political theory, and constitutional law. He is admitted to the English Bar as a member of Gray’s Inn.
Finnis was educated at St. Peter's College, Adelaide and the University of Adelaide, where he was a member of St. Mark's College. He obtained his LL.B. there, winning a Rhodes scholarship to University College, Oxford, in 1962, where he obtained his D.Phil. for a thesis on the concept of judicial power, with reference to Australian federal constitutional law.
Finnis is one of the most prominent living legal philosophers. His work, Natural Law and Natural Rights, is regarded as one of the definitive works of natural law philosophy, drawing both on Oxonian and Catholic Thomistic philosophical traditions to challenge the dominant Anglo-positivist approach to legal philosophy taken by John Austin and H. L. A. Hart.
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John Locke
John Locke FRS ( /ˈlɒk/; 29 August 1632 – 28 October 1704), widely known as the Father of Classical Liberalism, was an English philosopher and physician regarded as one of the most influential of Enlightenment thinkers. Considered one of the first of the British empiricists, following the tradition of Francis Bacon, he is equally important to social contract theory. His work had a great impact upon the development of epistemology and political philosophy. His writings influenced Voltaire and Rousseau, many Scottish Enlightenment thinkers, as well as the American revolutionaries. His contributions to classical republicanism and liberal theory are reflected in the United States Declaration of Independence.
Locke's theory of mind is often cited as the origin of modern conceptions of identity and the self, figuring prominently in the work of later philosophers such as Hume, Rousseau and Kant. Locke was the first to define the self through a continuity of consciousness. He postulated that the mind was a blank slate or tabula rasa. Contrary to pre-existing Cartesian philosophy, he maintained that we are born without innate ideas, and that knowledge is instead determined only by experience derived from sense perception.
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John McDowell
John Henry McDowell (born 1942) is a South African philosopher, formerly a fellow of University College, Oxford and now University Professor at the University of Pittsburgh. Although he has written extensively on metaphysics, epistemology, ancient philosophy, and meta-ethics, McDowell's most influential work has been in the philosophy of mind and philosophy of language. McDowell was one of three recipients of the 2010 Andrew W. Mellon Foundation's Distinguished Achievement Award.
McDowell has, throughout his career, understood philosophy to be "therapeutic" and thereby to "leave everything as it is", which he understands to be a form of philosophical quietism (although he does not consider himself to be a "quietist"). The philosophical quietist believes that philosophy cannot make any explanatory comment about how, for example, thought and talk relate to the world but can, by offering re-descriptions of philosophically problematic cases, return the confused philosopher to a state of intellectual quietude. However, in defending this quietistic perspective McDowell has engaged with the work of leading contemporaries in such a way as to both therapeutically dissolve what he takes to be philosophical error, while developing original and distinctive theses about language, mind and value. In each case, he has tried to resist the influence of what he regards as a misguided, reductive form of philosophical naturalism that dominates the work of his contemporaries, particularly in North America.
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John Rawls
John Bordley Rawls (February 21, 1921 - November 24, 2002) was an American philosopher and a leading figure in moral and political philosophy. He held the James Bryant Conant University Professorship at Harvard University.
His magnum opus, A Theory of Justice (1971), was hailed at the time of its publication as "the most important work in moral philosophy since the end of World War II," and is now regarded as "one of the primary texts in political philosophy." His work in political philosophy, dubbed Rawlsianism, takes as its starting point the argument that "most reasonable principles of justice are those everyone would accept and agree to from a fair position." Rawls employs a number of thought experiments — including the famous veil of ignorance — to determine what constitutes a fair agreement in which "everyone is impartially situated as equals," in order to determine principles of social justice. He is one of the major thinkers in the tradition of liberal political philosophy.[citation needed] English philosopher Jonathan Wolff argues that "while there might be a dispute about the second most important political philosopher of the 20th century, there could be no dispute about the most important: John Rawls. His student Samuel Freeman says that Rawls’s work will be recognized 'for centuries to come.'"
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John Searle
John Rogers Searle (born July 31, 1932, in Denver, Colorado) is an American philosopher and currently the Slusser Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley. Widely noted for his contributions to the philosophy of language, philosophy of mind and social philosophy, he began teaching at Berkeley in 1959, where, among his many distinctions, he was the first tenured professor to join the Free Speech Movement. He received the Jean Nicod Prize in 2000, and the National Humanities Medal in 2004. Among his notable concepts are the "Chinese Room" argument against artificial intelligence.
Searle's father, G. W. Searle, an electrical engineer, was employed by AT&T, while his mother, Hester Beck Searle, was a physician. John Searle began his college education at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and subsequently became a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford University, where he earned an undergraduate degree and a doctorate in philosophy and ethics.
In the 1950s, as an undergraduate at the University of Wisconsin, Searle was the secretary of "Students against Joseph McCarthy" (McCarthy was then the junior Senator from Wisconsin).
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John Stuart Mill
John Stuart Mill, FRSE (20 May 1806 – 8 May 1873) was a British philosopher, political economist and civil servant. He was an influential contributor to social theory, political theory, and political economy. He has been called "the most influential English-speaking philosopher of the nineteenth century". Mill's conception of liberty justified the freedom of the individual in opposition to unlimited state control. He was a proponent of utilitarianism, an ethical theory developed by Jeremy Bentham. Hoping to remedy the problems found in an inductive approach to science, such as confirmation bias, he clearly set forth the premises of falsification as the key component in the scientific method. Mill was also a Member of Parliament and an important figure in liberal political philosophy.
John Stuart Mill was born on Rodney Street in the Pentonville area of London, the eldest son of the Scottish philosopher, historian and economist James Mill, and Harriet Burrow. John Stuart was educated by his father, with the advice and assistance of Jeremy Bentham and Francis Place. He was given an extremely rigorous upbringing, and was deliberately shielded from association with children his own age other than his siblings. His father, a follower of Bentham and an adherent of associationism, had as his explicit aim to create a genius intellect that would carry on the cause of utilitarianism and its implementation after he and Bentham had died.
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Joseph Black
Joseph Black FRSE FRCPE FPSG (16 April 1728 – 6 December 1799) was a Scottish physician and chemist, known for his discoveries of latent heat, specific heat, and carbon dioxide. He was professor of Medicine at University of Glasgow (where he also served as lecturer in Chemistry). James Watt, who was appointed as philosophical instrument maker at the same university in 1756 consulted with Black on experiments with his steam engine. Watt and Black also collaborated in project to manufacture sodium hydroxide; however, Black was not known to have any business interest in the process, which did not enjoy commercial success. The chemistry buildings at both the University of Edinburgh and the University of Glasgow are named after Black.
Black was born in Bordeaux, France, where his father, who was from Belfast, Ireland, was engaged in the wine trade. His mother was from Aberdeenshire, Scotland, and her family was also in the wine business. Joseph had twelve brothers and sisters. He entered the University of Glasgow when he was eighteen years old, and four years later he went to Edinburgh to further his medical studies.
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Joseph Margolis
Joseph Zalman Margolis (born on May 16, 1924 in Newark, New Jersey) is an American philosopher. A radical historicist, he has published many books critical of the central assumptions of Western philosophy, and has elaborated a robust form of relativism.
His philosophical affinities include Protagoras, Hegel, C.S. Peirce, John Dewey, Ludwig Wittgenstein, W.V. Quine.
Joseph Margolis was the son of central European, Jewish immigrants. His father, a dentist, was a well-read man, greatly interested in literature, and proficient in four languages.
Before dedicating himself to philosophy, Margolis served in World War II as a paratrooper. He was wounded during the Battle of the Bulge, and lost his only brother, a twin, in the same engagement. He studied at Columbia University, earning both the M.A. (1950) and Ph.D (1953) in philosophy. Famous contemporaries at Columbia included the art theorist Arthur C. Danto and the philosopher Marx Wartofsky.
Margolis has taught at numerous universities in the United States and Canada, as well as lecturing throughout Europe, in Japan, New Zealand, and South Africa. Since 1991 he has held the Laura H. Carnell Chair of Philosophy at Temple University, Philadelphia.
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Joseph Raz
Joseph Raz (Hebrew: יוסף רז; born 21 March 1939) is a legal, moral and political philosopher. He is one of the most prominent advocates of legal positivism. He has spent most of his career as professor of philosophy of law and a fellow of Balliol College, Oxford, and simultaneously as professor of law at Columbia University Law School. Raz is currently a visiting professor at King's College London. Several of Raz's students have become important legal and moral philosophers, including the two current Professors in Jurisprudence at Oxford, John Gardner and Leslie Green.
Born in Mandate Palestine in 1939, Joseph Raz graduated in 1963 from the Hebrew University, Jerusalem, Israel with a Magister Juris (Master of Jurisprudence), summa cum laude. Later, with funds provided by the Hebrew University, Raz pursued a Doctor of Philosophy (DPhil) at Oxford University under the supervision of H. L. A. Hart. This was by no means coincidental; Raz had met Hart earlier at a conference in Israel. Hart says that at this meeting, Raz pointed out a flaw in his reasoning that had previously eluded him. Hart encouraged him to go to Oxford for further study.
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Josiah Royce
Josiah Royce (November 20, 1855 – September 14, 1916) was an American objective idealist philosopher.
Royce, born in Grass Valley, California, grew up in pioneer California very soon after the California Gold Rush. He received the B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley (at that time located in Oakland) in 1875 where he also accepted an instructorship teaching English composition, literature, and rhetoric. After some time in Germany, where he came to admire Hermann Lotze, the new Johns Hopkins University awarded him in 1878 one of its first four doctorates, in philosophy. He taught a course on the history of German thought, which was “one of his chief interests” because he was able to give consideration to the philosophy of history (Pomeroy, 6). He then taught philosophy, first at the University of California, Berkeley, then at Harvard from 1882 until his death, thanks to the good offices of William James, who was at once Royce's friend and philosophical antagonist.
Royce stands out starkly in the philosophical crowd because he was the only major American philosopher who spent a significant period of his life studying and writing history, specifically of the American West, “As one of the four giants in American philosophy of his time […] Royce overshadowed himself as historian, in both reputation and output” (Pomeroy, 2). During his first three years at Harvard, Royce taught many different subjects such as English composition, forensics, psychology and philosophy for other professors. He finally received a position as a professor in 1892. During this time he suffered a breakdown and took a semester off during which he did most of his historical writing (Pomeroy, 3).
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José Ortega y Gasset
José Ortega y Gasset (9 May 1883 – 18 October 1955) was a Spanish liberal philosopher and essayist working during the first half of the 20th century while Spain oscillated between monarchy, republicanism and dictatorship. He was, along with Nietzsche, a proponent of the idea of perspectivism, which was pioneered in European thought by Immanuel Kant.
José Ortega y Gasset (Spanish pronunciation: [xo'se oɾ'tega i ga'set]) was born 9 May 1883 in Madrid. His father was director of the newspaper El Imparcial, which belonged to the family of his mother, Dolores Gasset. The family was definitively of Spain's end-of-the-century liberal and educated bourgeoisie. The liberal tradition and journalistic engagement of his family had a profound influence in Ortega y Gasset's activism in politics.
Ortega was first schooled by the Jesuit priests of San Estanislao in Miraflores del Palo, Málaga (1891–1897). He attended the University of Deusto, Bilbao (1897–98) and the Faculty of Philosophy and Letters at the Central University of Madrid, (now Complutense University of Madrid) (1898–1904), receiving a doctorate in Philosophy. From 1905 to 1907, he continued his studies in Germany at Leipzig, Nuremberg, Cologne, Berlin and, above all Marburg. At Marburg, he was influenced by the neo-Kantianism of Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, among others.
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Jules Coleman
Jules Leslie Coleman is a scholar of law and jurisprudence. He is the Wesley Newcomb Hohfeld Professor of Jurisprudence and Professor of Philosophy at Yale Law School.
Coleman received his B.A. from Brooklyn College of CUNY in 1968, his Ph.D in Philosophy from Rockefeller University in 1972, and his M.S.L. from the Yale Law School in 1976. He teaches classes at Yale on philosophy of law; torts; law, language and truth; political philosophy; and rational choice. Coleman briefly served on the faculty of the University of California at Berkeley and returned there again later in his career to teach philosophy in the Jurisprudence and Social Policy program. In 1988, he received the Brooklyn College Distinguished Alumni Award and was granted a Guggenheim Fellowship. He was selected to deliver the Clarendon Lectures at the University of Oxford.
Coleman is also known for his audiophilia and has published occasionally on the subject of music and sound systems.
Coleman's brother is the fiction writer Reed Farrel Coleman.
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Jürgen Habermas
Jürgen Habermas ( /ˈjɜrɡən/ or /ˈjʊərɡən ˈhɑːbərmɑːs/;German: [ˈjʏʁɡən ˈhaːbɐmaːs]; born June 18, 1929) is a German sociologist, geographer and philosopher in the tradition of critical theory and pragmatism. He is perhaps best known for his theory on the concepts of 'communicative rationality' and the 'public sphere'. His work focuses on the foundations of social theory and epistemology, the analysis of advanced capitalistic societies and democracy, the rule of law in a critical social-evolutionary context, and contemporary politics, particularly German politics. Habermas's theoretical system is devoted to revealing the possibility of reason, emancipation, and rational-critical communication latent in modern institutions and in the human capacity to deliberate and pursue rational interests. Habermas is known for his work on the concept of modernity, particularly with respect to the discussions of "rationalization" originally set forth by Max Weber. While influenced by American pragmatism, action theory, and even poststructuralism, many of the central tenets of Habermas' thought remain broadly Marxist in nature. Global polls identified him as one of the leading intellectuals of the present day.
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Kapila
Kapila (Hindi: कपिल ऋषि) was a Vedic sage credited as one of the founders of the Samkhya school of philosophy. He is prominent in the Bhagavata Purana, which features a theistic version of his Samkhya philosophy. Traditional Hindu sources describe him as a descendant of Manu, a grandson of Brahma. The Bhagavad Gita depicts Kapila as a yogi hermit with highly developed siddhis, or spiritual powers.
Many of the details about sage Kapila's life are described in Book 3 of the Bhagavata Purana, where it is mentioned that his parents were Kardama Muni and Devahuti. Kapila is considered an incarnation of the supreme-being (Narayana) and listed as such in the list of incarnations in Bhagavata Purana .After his father left home, Kapila instructed his mother, Devahuti in the philosophy of yoga and devotional worship of Lord Vishnu, enabling her to achieve liberation (moksha). Kapila's Sankhya is also given by Krishna to Uddhava in Book 11 of the Bhagavata Purana, a passage also known as the "Uddhava Gita".
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Karl Barth
Karl Barth ((1886-05-10)May 10, 1886 – December 10, 1968(1968-12-10)) (pronounced "Bart") was a Swiss Reformed theologian whom many scholars hold to be among the most important thinkers of the 20th century; Pope Pius XII described him as the most important theologian since Thomas Aquinas. Beginning with his experience as a pastor, he rejected his training in the predominant liberal theology typical of 19th-century European Protestantism.
Instead he embarked on a new theological path initially called dialectical theology, due to its stress on the paradoxical nature of divine truth (e.g., God's relationship to humanity embodies both grace and judgment). Other critics have referred to Barth as the father of neo-orthodoxy — a term emphatically rejected by Barth himself. The most accurate description of his work might be "a theology of the Word." Barth's theological thought emphasized the sovereignty of God, particularly through his interpretation of the Calvinistic doctrine of election.
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Karl Jaspers
Karl Theodor Jaspers (February 23, 1883 – February 26, 1969) was a German psychiatrist and philosopher who had a strong influence on modern theology, psychiatry and philosophy. After being trained in and practicing psychiatry, Jaspers turned to philosophical inquiry and attempted to discover an innovative philosophical system. He was often viewed as a major exponent of existentialism in Germany, though he did not accept this label.
Jaspers was born in Oldenburg in 1883 to a mother from a local farming community, and a jurist father. He showed an early interest in philosophy, but his father's experience with the legal system undoubtedly influenced his decision to study law at university. It soon became clear that Jaspers did not particularly enjoy law, and he switched to studying medicine in 1902 with a thesis about criminology. In 1910 he married Gertrud Mayer (1879-1974), the sister of his close friends Gustav and Ernst Mayer.
Jaspers graduated from medical school in 1909 and began work at a psychiatric hospital in Heidelberg where Emil Kraepelin had worked some years earlier. Jaspers became dissatisfied with the way the medical community of the time approached the study of mental illness and set himself the task of improving the psychiatric approach. In 1913 Jaspers gained a temporary post as a psychology teacher at Heidelberg University. The post later became permanent, and Jaspers never returned to clinical practice. During this time Jaspers was a close friend of the Weber family (Max Weber also having held a professorship at Heidelberg).
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Karl Llewellyn
Karl Nickerson Llewellyn (May 22, 1893 – February 13, 1962) was a prominent American jurisprudential scholar associated with the school of legal realism. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Llewellyn as one of the twenty most cited American legal scholars of the 20th century.
He was born on May 22, 1893 in Seattle but grew up in Brooklyn. He attended Yale College and Yale Law School, where he served as editor-in-chief of the Yale Law Journal.
Llewellyn was studying abroad at the Sorbonne in Paris when World War I broke out in 1914. He was sympathetic to the German cause and traveled to Germany in an attempt to enlist in the German army, only to be rejected because of his refusal to renounce his American citizenship. Nevertheless, Llewellyn was allowed to fight with the 78th Prussian Infantry Regiment, and was injured at the First Battle of Ypres. For his actions, he was promoted to sergeant and decorated with the Iron Cross, 2nd class. After spending ten weeks in a German hospital at Nürtingen, and having his petition to enlist without swearing allegiance to Germany turned down, Llewellyn returned to the United States and his studies at Yale in March 1915. Amazingly, after the United States entered the war, Llewellyn attempted to enlist in the US army. He was rejected due to his participation in the German army.
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Karl Marx
Karl Heinrich Marx (5 May 1818 – 14 March 1883) was a German philosopher, economist, sociologist, historian, journalist, and revolutionary socialist. His ideas played a significant role in the development of social science and the socialist political movement. He published various books during his lifetime, with the most notable being The Communist Manifesto (1848) and Capital (1867–1894); some of his works were co-written with his friend and fellow German revolutionary socialist, Friedrich Engels.
Born into a wealthy middle class family in Trier, formerly in Prussian Rhineland now called Rhineland-Palatinate, Marx studied at both the University of Bonn and the University of Berlin, where he became interested in the philosophical ideas of the Young Hegelians. In 1836, he became engaged to Jenny von Westphalen, marrying her in 1843. After his studies, he wrote for a radical newspaper in Cologne, and began to work out his theory of dialectical materialism. Moving to Paris in 1843, he began writing for other radical newspapers. He met Engels in Paris, and the two men worked together on a series of books. Exiled to Brussels, he became a leading figure of the Communist League, before moving back to Cologne, where he founded his own newspaper. In 1849 he was exiled again and moved to London together with his wife and children. In London, where the family was reduced to poverty, Marx continued writing and formulating his theories about the nature of society and how he believed it could be improved, and also campaigned for socialism—he became a significant figure in the International Workingmen's Association.
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Karl Olivecrona
Karl Olivecrona (25 October 1897, Norrbärke–1980) was a Swedish lawyer and legal philosopher: He studied law at Uppsala from 1915 to 1920 and was a pupil of Axel Hägerström, the spiritual father of Scandinavian legal realism. One of the internationally best-known Swedish legal theorists, Olivecrona was a professor of procedural law and legal philosophy at Lund University. His writings emphasise the psychological significance of legal ideas. His most striking work on legal theory, the first edition of his book Law as Fact (of 1939, almost entirely different in content from the similarly titled 1971 work), stressed the importance of a monopoly of force as the fundamental basis of law. Olivecrona's politics during World War II showed a related stress on a need for overwhelming coercive power to guarantee order in international relations. He became convinced that Europe required an unchallengeable controlling force to ensure its peace and unity, and that Germany alone could provide this. His pamphlet England eller Tyskland (England or Germany), published in the darkest days of the war, argued that England had lost its claim to exert leadership in Europe and that the future required an acceptance of German hegemony.
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Karl Pearson
Karl Pearson FRS (27 March 1857 – 27 April 1936) was an influential English mathematician who has been credited for establishing the discipline of mathematical statistics.
In 1911 he founded the world's first university statistics department at University College London. He was a proponent of eugenics, and a protégé and biographer of Sir Francis Galton.
A sesquicentenary conference was held in London on 23 March 2007, to celebrate the 150th anniversary of his birth.
Carl Pearson, later known as Karl Pearson (1857–1936), was born to William Pearson and Fanny Smith, who had three children, Aurthur, Carl (Karl) and Amy. William Pearson also sired an illegitimate son, Frederick Mockett.
Pearson's mother, Fanny Pearson née Smith, came from a family of master mariners who sailed their own ships from Hull; his father read law at Edinburgh and was a successful barrister and Queen's Counsel (QC). William Pearson's father's family came from the North Riding of Yorkshire.
"Carl Pearson" inadvertently became "Karl Pearson" when he enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1879, which changed the spelling. He used both variants of his name until 1884 when he finally adopted Karl — supposedly also after Karl Marx[citation needed], though some argue otherwise. Eventually he became universally known as "KP".
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Karl Popper
Sir Karl Raimund Popper, CH FRSFBA (28 July 1902 – 17 September 1994) was an Austro-Britishphilosopher and professor at the London School of Economics. He is generally regarded as one of the greatest philosophers of science of the 20th century; he also wrote extensively on social and political philosophy.
Popper is known for his attempt to repudiate the classical observationalist/inductivist form of scientific method in favour of empirical falsification. He is also known for his opposition to the classical justificationist account of knowledge which he replaced with critical rationalism, "the first non justificational philosophy of criticism in the history of philosophy". In political discourse, he is known for his vigorous defence of liberal democracy and the principles of social criticism that he came to believe made a flourishing "open society" possible.
Karl Popper was born in Vienna (then in Austria-Hungary) in 1902, to upper middle-class parents. All of Karl Popper's grandparents were Jewish, but the Popper family converted to Lutheranism before Karl was born. Karl's father Simon Siegmund Carl Popper was a lawyer from Bohemia, and mother Jenny Schiff was of Silesian and Hungarian descent. After establishing themselves in Vienna, the Poppers made a rapid social climb in Viennese society: Simon Siegmund Carl became a legal partner[clarification needed] of Vienna's liberal mayor Raimond Grübl and, after his death in 1898, took over the firm (Karl received his middle name from the mayor).
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Karl Renner
Karl Renner (help·info) (14 December 1870 – 31 December 1950) was an Austrian politician. He was born in Untertannowitz in the Austro-Hungarian Empire (today in the Czech Republic) and died in Vienna. He is called the Father of the Republic because he headed the first government in republican Austria in 1918 and was once again decisive in establishing the present Second Republic in 1945, becoming its first President.
Renner was born the 18th child of a small farmer but, because of his intelligence, was allowed to attend a selective gymnasium. One of his teachers was Wilhelm Jerusalem. From 1890 to 1896 he studied law at the University of Vienna. In 1895 he was one of the founding members of the Naturfreunde (Friends of Nature) organisation and created their logo. A chapter of the organization (Naturfreunde) is located in the town of Mill Valley (founded in 1912), Oakland and Los Angeles, California . Being interested in politics he became a librarian in parliament. During these early years he opened new perspectives of law - all the while disowning his innovative ideas under a variety of pseudonyms lest he lose his coveted post as parliamentary librarian.
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Larry Laudan
Larry Laudan (b. Austin, Texas, 1941) is a contemporary philosopher of science and epistemologist. He has strongly criticized the traditions of positivism, realism, and relativism, and he has defended a view of science as a privileged and progressive institution against popular challenges. Laudan's philosophical view of "research traditions" is seen as an important alternative to Imre Lakatos's "research programs."
His most important contributions to the philosophy of science can be found in his book Progress and its Problems (1977) while acting as chair of the history and philosophy of science department at the University of Pittsburgh. Laudan charges philosophers of science with paying lip service to the view that “science is fundamentally a problem-solving activity” without taking seriously the view's implications for the history of science and its philosophy, and without questioning certain issues in the historiography and methodology of science. Against empiricism, which is represented by Karl Popper, and "revolutionism," represented by Thomas Kuhn, Laudan maintained in Progress and its Problems that science is an evolving process that accumulates more empirically validated evidence while solving conceptual anomalies at the same time. Mere evidence collecting or empirical confirmation does not constitute the true mechanism of scientific advancement; conceptual resolution and comparison of the solutions of anomalies provided by various theories form an indispensable part of the evolution of science.
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Laurence BonJour
Laurence BonJour (born 31 August 1943) is an American philosopher and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Washington.
He received his bachelor's degrees in Philosophy and Political Science from Macalester College and his doctorate in 1969 from Princeton University with a dissertation directed by Richard Rorty. Before moving to UW he taught at the University of Texas at Austin.
His areas of specialty include epistemology, Kant, and British empiricism.
BonJour's work, along with that of Roderick Chisholm, Keith Lehrer, and Michael Williams, is at the center of current debates in epistemology. Initially defending coherentism in his anti-foundationalist critique The Structure of Empirical Knowledge, BonJour has since moved to defend Cartesian[disambiguation needed
]foundationalism in such works as Epistemology and In Defense of Pure Reason. The latter book is a sustained defense of a priori justification, strongly criticizing empiricists and pragmatists who dismiss it (such as W. V. O. Quine and Richard Rorty).
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Laurence Tribe
Laurence Henry Tribe (born October 10, 1941) is a professor of constitutional law at Harvard Law School and the Carl M. Loeb University Professor at Harvard University. He also works with the firm Massey & Gail LLP on a variety of matters.
Tribe is widely recognized as a leading liberal scholar of constitutional law. He is the author of American Constitutional Law (1978), a treatise in that field, and has argued before the United States Supreme Court 35 times.
Tribe was born in the World War II Shanghai ghetto to parents of Askenazi Jewish descent, originally from modern-day Belarus. He attended Abraham Lincoln High School in San Francisco, California. He holds an A.B. in mathematics, summa cum laude from Harvard College (1962), and a J.D., magna cum laude from Harvard Law School (1966), where he was a member of the Harvard Legal Aid Bureau. Tribe was a national champion policy debater at Harvard, and later a college coach and high school summer institute teacher.[citation needed]
Tribe served as a law clerk to Mathew Tobriner on the California Supreme Court from 1966–67, and as a law clerk to Potter Stewart of the U.S. Supreme Court from 1967–68. He joined the Harvard Law School faculty as an assistant professor in 1968, receiving tenure in 1972.[citation needed]
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Learned Hand
Billings Learned Hand ( /ˈlɜrnɨd/ LURN-id; January 27, 1872 – August 18, 1961) was a United States judge and judicial philosopher. He served on the United States District Court for the Southern District of New York and later the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit. Hand has been quoted more often than any other lower-court judge by legal scholars and by the Supreme Court of the United States.
Born and raised in Albany, New York, Hand majored in philosophy at Harvard College and graduated with honors from Harvard Law School. After a short career as a lawyer in Albany and New York City, he was appointed as a Federal District Judge in Manhattan in 1909 at the age of 37. The profession suited his detached and open-minded temperament, and his decisions soon won him a reputation for craftsmanship and authority. Between 1909 and 1914, under the influence of Herbert Croly's social theories, Hand supported New Nationalism. He ran unsuccessfully as the Progressive Party's candidate for Chief Judge of the New York Court of Appeals in 1913, but withdrew from active politics shortly afterwards. In 1924, President Calvin Coolidge promoted Hand to the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, which he went on to lead as the Senior Circuit Judge (later retitled Chief Judge) from 1939 until his semi-retirement in 1951. Scholars have recognized the Second Circuit under Hand as one of the finest appeals courts in the country's history. Friends and admirers often lobbied for Hand's promotion to the Supreme Court, but circumstances and his political past conspired against his appointment.
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Leo Strauss
Leo Strauss (September 20, 1899 – October 18, 1973) was a German-American political philosopher and classicist who specialized in classical political philosophy. He was born in Germany to Jewish parents and later emigrated to the United States. He spent most of his career as a professor of political science at the University of Chicago, where he taught several generations of students and published fifteen books.
Originally trained in the Neo-Kantian tradition with Ernst Cassirer and immersed in the work of the phenomenologists Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, Strauss later focused his research on the Greek texts of Plato and Aristotle, retracing their interpretation through medieval Islamic and Jewish philosophy, and encouraged application of their ideas to contemporary political theory.
Leo Strauss was born in the small town of Kirchhain in Hessen-Nassau, a province of the Kingdom of Prussia (part of the German Empire), on September 20, 1899, to Hugo Strauss and Jennie Strauss, née David. According to Allan Bloom's 1974 obituary in Political Theory, Strauss "was raised as an Orthodox Jew," but the family does not appear to have completely embraced Orthodox practice. Strauss himself noted that he came from a "conservative, even orthodox Jewish home," but one which knew little about Judaism except strict adherence to ceremonial laws. His father and uncle operated a farm supply and livestock business that they inherited from their father, Meyer (1835–1919), a leading member of the local Jewish community.
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Leon Petrazycki
Leon Petrazycki (Polish: Leon Petrażycki; Russian: Лев Иосифович Петражицкий Lev Iosifovich Petrazhitsky; 13 April 1867, Vitebsk Governorate – 15 May 1931, Warsaw) was a Polish philosopher, legal scholar and sociologist. He is considered one of the important forerunners of the sociology of law.
Leon Petrażycki was born into the Polish gentry of the Vitebsk Governorate in the Russian Empire. He graduated from Kiev University in 1890, spent two years on a scholarship in Berlin and got his doctorate in 1896 from the University of St. Petersburg. At the latter university he served from 1897 to 1917 as a professor of the Philosophy of Law.
In 1906 Petrażycki was elected to the ill-fated First Duma as a member of the Constitutional Democratic Party. When the legislature was dissolved after a few months, he was convicted and incarcerated for his protests. He was appointed to the Supreme Court of Russia in 1917, but had to flee the country when the Bolshevik revolution succeeded. He found a new home in Poland and became the first professor of Sociology at Warsaw University in 1919.
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Leonardo da Vinci
Leonardo di ser Piero da Vinci (Italian pronunciation: [leoˈnardo da ˈvintʃi] pronunciation (help·info); April 15, 1452 – May 2, 1519, Old Style) was an Italian Renaissance polymath: painter, sculptor, architect, musician, scientist, mathematician, engineer, inventor, anatomist, geologist, cartographer, botanist, and writer whose genius, perhaps more than that of any other figure, epitomized the Renaissance humanist ideal. Leonardo has often been described as the archetype of the Renaissance Man, a man of "unquenchable curiosity" and "feverishly inventive imagination". He is widely considered to be one of the greatest painters of all time and perhaps the most diversely talented person ever to have lived. According to art historian Helen Gardner, the scope and depth of his interests were without precedent and "his mind and personality seem to us superhuman, the man himself mysterious and remote". Marco Rosci points out, however, that while there is much speculation about Leonardo, his vision of the world is essentially logical rather than mysterious, and that the empirical methods he employed were unusual for his time.
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Lev Shestov
Lev Isaakovich Shestov (Russian: Лев Исаа́кович Шесто́в), born Yehuda Leyb Schwarzmann (Russian: Иегуда Лейб Шварцман), was a Ukrainian/Russian existentialist philosopher. Born in Kiev (Russian Empire) on February 13 [O.S. January 31] 1866, he emigrated to France in 1921, fleeing from the aftermath of the October Revolution. He lived in Paris until his death on November 19, 1938.
Shestov was born Lev Isaakovich Schwarzmann in Kiev into a Jewish family. He obtained an education at various places, due to fractious clashes with authority. He went on to study law and mathematics at the Moscow State University but after a clash with the Inspector of Students he was told to return to Kiev, where he completed his studies.
Shestov's dissertation prevented him from becoming a doctor of law, as it was dismissed on account of its revolutionary tendencies. In 1898 he entered a circle of prominent Russian intellectuals and artists which included Nikolai Berdyaev, Sergei Diaghilev, Dmitri Merezhkovsky and Vasily Rozanov. Shestov contributed articles to a journal the circle had established. During this time he completed his first major philosophical work, Good in the Teaching of Tolstoy and Nietzsche: Philosophy and Preaching; both authors mentioned in the title had a profound impact on Shestov's thinking.
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Lewis White Beck
Lewis White Beck (September 26, 1913 – June 7, 1997) was an American philosopher and scholar of German philosophy. Beck was Burbank Professor of Intellectual and Moral Philosophy at the University of Rochester and served as the Philosophy Department chair there from 1949 to 1966. He translated several of Immanuel Kant's works, including the Critique of Practical Reason, and was the author of Studies in The Philosophy of Kant (1965).
Born in Griffin, Georgia, Beck received his bachelor's degree from Emory University in 1934, his master's degree from Duke University in 1935, and his doctoral degree from Duke University in 1937.
Before moving to Rochester, he was a Fellow at the University of Berlin (1937–38), an instructor at Emory University (1938–41), assistant professor at the University of Delaware (1941–46), and associate professor at Lehigh University (1946–48), eventually becoming professor (1948–49). He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1963.
He retired in 1979 and died at age 83 in Rochester, New York.
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Loyal Rue
Loyal Rue is an American philosopher and writer whose research focuses on naturalistic theories of religion. He is Professor Emeritus in the philosophy and religion departments at Luther College in Decorah, Iowa.
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Ludwig Feuerbach
Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach (July 28, 1804, Landshut, Lower Bavaria – September 13, 1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist. He was the fourth son of the eminent jurist Paul Johann Anselm Ritter von Feuerbach, brother of mathematician Karl Wilhelm Feuerbach and uncle of painter Anselm Feuerbach. An associate of Left Hegelian circles, Feuerbach was politically liberal, an atheist and a materialist. Many of his philosophical writings offered a critical analysis of Christianity. His thought was influential in the development of dialectical materialism, where he is often recognized as a bridge between Hegel and Marx.
Feuerbach matriculated in the University of Heidelberg with the intention of pursuing a career in the church.[citation needed] Through the influence of Prof. Karl Daub he was led to an interest in the then predominant philosophy of Hegel and, in spite of his father's opposition, enrolled in the University of Berlin in order to study under the master himself. After 22 years, the Hegelian influence began to slacken. Feuerbach became associated with a group known as the Young Hegelians, alternately known as the Left Hegelians, who synthesized a radical offshoot of Hegelian philosophy, interpreting Hegel's dialectic march of spirit through history to mean that existing Western culture and institutional forms—and, in particular, Christianity—would be superseded. "Theology," he wrote to a friend, "I can bring myself to study no more. I long to take nature to my heart, that nature before whose depth the faint-hearted theologian shrinks back; and with nature man, man in his entire quality." These words are a key to Feuerbach's development. He completed his education at Erlangen, at the Friedrich-Alexander-University, Erlangen-Nuremberg with the study of natural science.
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Ludwig von Mises
Ludwig Heinrich Edler von Mises (German pronunciation: [ˈluːtvɪç fɔn ˈmiːzəs]; September 29, 1881 – October 10, 1973) was a philosopher, Austrian School economist, and classical liberal. He became a prominent figure in the Austrian School of economic thought and is best known for his work on praxeology. Fearing a Nazi takeover of Europe, Mises emigrated to the United States in 1940. Mises had a significant influence on the libertarian movement in the United States in the mid-20th century.
Ludwig von Mises was born to wealthy Jewish parents in the city of Lemberg, in Galicia, Austria-Hungary (now Lviv in Ukraine). The family of his father Arthur Edler von Mises had been elevated to the Austrian nobility in the 19th century, and was involved in building and financing railroads. Ludwig's mother, Adele (née Landau), was a niece of Dr. Joachim Landau, a Liberal Party deputy to the Austrian Parliament. Arthur was stationed there as a construction engineer with Czernowitz railway company. At the age of twelve Ludwig spoke fluent Yiddish, German, Polish, and French, read Latin, and could understand Ukrainian. Mises was the older brother of the famous applied physicist Richard von Mises, a member of the Vienna Circle. Another brother, Karl von Mises, died as a child from scarlet fever.[citation needed] When Ludwig and Richard were children, his family moved back to their ancestral home of Vienna.
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Ludwig Wittgenstein
Ludwig Josef Johann Wittgenstein (26 April 1889 – 29 April 1951) was an Austrian-British philosopher who worked primarily in logic, the philosophy of mathematics, the philosophy of mind, and the philosophy of language. He was professor in philosophy at the University of Cambridge from 1939 until 1947. In his lifetime, he published just one book review, one article, a children's dictionary, and the 75-page Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921). In 1999, his posthumously published Philosophical Investigations (1953) was ranked as the most important book of 20th-century philosophy, standing out as "...the one crossover masterpiece in twentieth-century philosophy, appealing across diverse specializations and philosophical orientations".Bertrand Russell described him as "the most perfect example I have ever known of genius as traditionally conceived, passionate, profound, intense, and dominating".
Born in Vienna into one of Europe's wealthiest families, he gave away his entire inheritance. Three of his brothers committed suicide, with Ludwig contemplating it too. He left academia several times: serving as an officer on the frontline during World War I, where he was decorated a number of times for his courage; teaching in schools in remote Austrian villages, where he encountered controversy for hitting children when they made mistakes in mathematics; and working during World War II as a hospital porter in London, where he told patients not to take the drugs they were prescribed, and where no-one knew he was one of the world's most famous philosophers. He described philosophy, however, as "the only work that gives me real satisfaction."
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Maimonides
Mosheh ben Maimon משה בן מימון, called Moses Maimonides and also known as Mūsā ibn Maymūn (Arabic: موسى بن ميمون), or RaMBaM (רמב"ם – Hebrew acronym for "Rabbi Mosheh Ben Maimon"), was a preeminent medieval Jewish philosopher and one of the most prolific and followed Torah scholars and physicians of the Middle Ages. He was born in Córdoba, Almoravid Empire (present-day Spain) on Passover Eve, 1135, and died in Egypt (or Tiberias) on 20th Tevet, December 12, 1204. He was a rabbi, physician and philosopher in Morocco and Egypt.
Although his writings on Jewish law and ethics were met with acclaim and gratitude from most Jews even as far off as Spain, Iraq and Yemen, and he rose to be the revered head of the Jewish community in Egypt, there were also vociferous critics of some of his rulings and other writings particularly in Spain. Nevertheless, he was posthumously acknowledged to be one of the foremost rabbinical arbiters and philosophers in Jewish history, his copious work a cornerstone of Jewish scholarship. His fourteen-volume Mishneh Torah still carries canonical authority as a codification of Talmudic law. In the Yeshiva world he is known as "haNesher haGadol" (the great eagle) in recognition of his outstanding status as a bona fide exponent of the Oral Torah.
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Markus Herz
Marcus (Markus) Herz (January 17, 1747 – January 19, 1803), was a Jewish German physician and lecturer on philosophy.
Born in Berlin to very poor parents, he was destined for a mercantile career, and in 1762 went to Königsberg, East Prussia. He soon gave up his position as clerk and attended the university of Königsberg, becoming a pupil of Kant, but was obliged to discontinue his studies for want of means. He thereupon became secretary to the wealthy Russian Ephraim, traveling with him through the Baltic Provinces. On August 21, 1770, he traveled from Berlin and acted as respondent when Kant presented his Inaugural dissertation at the University of Königsberg for the post of ordinary professor. In 1770 he had returned to Germany and studied medicine in Halle, where he became an MD in 1774, in which year he established himself in Berlin, being appointed physician at the Jewish hospital. Beginning in 1777, he delivered public lectures on medicine and philosophy, which were well attended by the students and the principal personages of the Prussian capital. At some of them even members of the royal family were present.
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Marquis de Condorcet
Marie Jean Antoine Nicolas de Caritat, marquis de Condorcet ([maʁi ʒɑ̃n‿ɑ̃twan nikola də kaʁita kɔ̃dɔʁˈse]; 17 September 1743 – 28 March 1794), known as Nicolas de Condorcet, was a French philosopher, mathematician, and early political scientist whose Condorcet method in voting tally selects the candidate who would beat each of the other candidates in a run-off election. Unlike many of his contemporaries, he advocated a liberal economy, free and equal public education, constitutionalism, and equal rights for women and people of all races. His ideas and writings were said to embody the ideals of the Age of Enlightenment and rationalism, and remain influential to this day. He died a mysterious death in prison after a period of being a fugitive from French Revolutionary authorities.
Condorcet was born in Ribemont, Aisne, and descended from the ancient family of Caritat, who took their title from the town of Condorcet in Dauphiné, of which they were long-time residents. Fatherless at a young age, he was raised by his devoutly religious mother. He was educated at the Jesuit College in Reims and at the Collège de Navarre in Paris, where he quickly showed his intellectual ability, and gained his first public distinctions in mathematics. When he was sixteen, his analytical abilities gained the praise of Jean le Rond d'Alembert and Alexis Clairaut; soon, Condorcet would study under d'Alembert.
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Marquis de Sade
Donatien Alphonse François, Marquis de Sade (2 June 1740 – 2 December 1814) (French pronunciation: [maʁki də sad] Audio) was a French aristocrat, revolutionary politician, philosopher, and writer famous for his libertine sexuality and lifestyle. His works include novels, short stories, plays, dialogues, and political tracts; in his lifetime some were published under his own name, while others appeared anonymously and Sade denied being their author. He is best known for his erotic works, which combined philosophical discourse with pornography, depicting sexual fantasies with an emphasis on violence, criminality, and blasphemy against the Catholic Church. He was a proponent of extreme freedom, unrestrained by morality, religion, or law.
Sade was incarcerated in various prisons and in an insane asylum for about 32 years of his life; 11 years in Paris (10 of which were spent in the Bastille), a month in the Conciergerie, two years in a fortress, a year in Madelonnettes, three years in Bicêtre, a year in Sainte-Pélagie, and 13 years in the Charenton asylum. During the French Revolution he was an elected delegate to the National Convention. Many of his works were written in prison.
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Marsilius of Padua
Marsilius of Padua (Italian Marsilio or Marsiglio da Padova; circa 1275 – circa 1342) was an Italian scholar, trained in medicine who practiced a variety of professions. He was also an important 14th century political figure. His political treatise Defensor pacis is seen by some authorities as the most revolutionary political treatise written in the later Middle Ages.
Marsillius was born in Padua, an important Italian city, circa 1275. He initially trained in medicine, but was employed in various professions, including that of a soldier. He went to the University of Paris in 1311. The reputation which he had gained in what were then called the physical sciences soon caused him to be raised to the position of rector of the university for the first term of the year 1313.
Marsilius wrote Defensor pacis in 1324. This treatise was created in the context of a power struggle between Pope John XXII and Louis of Bavaria (or Ludwig of Bavaria), the elected candidate for Holy Roman Emperor. Louis' policies in the Italian peninsula, where the Empire had important territories, threatened papal territorial sovereignty. In 1323 Louis had sent an army to Italy to protect Milan against the powerful Kingdom of Naples. Naples, along with France, was a powerful ally of John XXII. John excommunicated Louis and demanded that he relinquish his claim to the imperial crown. Louis responded to John XXII with fresh provocations.[citation needed]
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Martha Fineman
Martha Albertson Fineman (born 1943) is an internationally renowned law and society scholar and a leading authority in feminist legal theory and family law. She is currently Robert W. Woodruff Professor of Law at Emory University School of Law, having formerly held the Dorothea S. Clarke Professorship of Feminist Jurisprudence at Cornell Law School and the Maurice T. Moore Professorship at Columbia Law School. She is an affiliated scholar of the Center for American Progress and of the Center for the Study of Law and Religion. Much of her early scholarship focuses on the legal regulation of family and intimacy; she has since broadened her scope to focus on the legal implications of universal dependency, vulnerability and justice. Her recent work formulates a theory of vulnerability, in order to argue for a more responsive state and a more egalitarian society. Fineman directs the Feminism and Legal Theory Project, which she founded in 1984 and which hosts scholars from around the world.
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Martha Nussbaum
Martha Nussbaum (born Martha Craven; May 6, 1947) is an American philosopher with a particular interest in ancient Greek and Roman philosophy, political philosophy and ethics.
Nussbaum, though not a lawyer, is currently Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, a chair that includes appointments in the Philosophy Department, the Law School, and the Divinity School. She also holds Associate appointments in Classics and Political Science, is a member of the Committee on Southern Asian Studies, and a Board Member of the Human Rights Program. She previously taught at Harvard and Brown.
Nussbaum was born in New York City, the daughter of George Craven, a Philadelphia lawyer, and Betty Warren, an interior designer and homemaker; during her teenage years, Nussbaum attended the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr. She described her upbringing as "East Coast WASP elite...very sterile, very preoccupied with money and status". She would later credit her impatience with "mandarin philosophers" as the "repudiation of my own aristocratic upbringing. I don't like anything that sets itself up as an in-group or an elite, whether it is the Bloomsbury group or Derrida".
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Martin Buber
Martin Buber (Hebrew: מרטין בובר; February 8, 1878 – June 13, 1965) was an Austrian-born Jewish philosopher best known for his philosophy of dialogue, a form of religious existentialism centered on the distinction between the I-Thou relationship and the I-It relationship. Born in Vienna, Buber came from a family of observant Jews, but broke with Jewish custom to pursue secular studies in philosophy. In 1902, Buber became the editor of the weekly Die Welt, the central organ of the Zionist movement, although he later withdrew from organizational work in Zionism. In 1923 Buber wrote his famous essay on existence, Ich und Du (later translated into English as I and Thou), and in 1925 he began translating the Hebrew Bible into the German language.
In 1930 Buber became an honorary professor at the University of Frankfurt am Main, and resigned in protest from his professorship immediately after Adolf Hitler came to power in 1933. He then founded the Central Office for Jewish Adult Education, which became an increasingly important body as the German government forbade Jews to attend public education. In 1938, Buber left Germany and settled in Jerusalem, Palestine, receiving a professorship at Hebrew University and lecturing in anthropology and introductory sociology.
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Martin Heidegger
Martin Heidegger (September 26, 1889 – May 26, 1976); German pronunciation: [ˈmaɐ̯tiːn ˈhaɪdɛɡɐ]) was a German philosopher known for his existential and phenomenological explorations of the "question of Being."
Heidegger argues that philosophy is preoccupied with what exists and has forgotten the question of the "ground" of being. We find ourselves "always already" fallen into a world that already existed; but he insists that we have forgotten the basic question of what being itself is. This question defines our central nature. He argues that we are practical agents, caring and concerned about our projects in the world, and allowing it to reveal, or "unconceal" itself to us. He also says that our manipulation of reality is often harmful and hides our true being as essentially limited participants, not masters, of the world which we discover.
Heidegger wrote about these issues in his best-known book, Being and Time (1927), which is considered to be one of the most important philosophical works of the 20th century. Heidegger's influence is far reaching, from philosophy to deconstructionism and literary theory, theology, architecture, and artificial intelligence.
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Martin Knutzen
Martin Knutzen (14 December 1713 - 29 January 1751) was a German philosopher, a disciple of Alexander Baumgarten and teacher of Immanuel Kant, to whom he introduced the physics of Newton.
Knutzen studied philosophy, mathematics and physics at the University of Königsberg (the present Kaliningrad), gaining his M.A. degree in 1733 with Dissertatio metaphysica de aeternitate mundi impossibili and becoming a Professor extraordinary of logic and metaphysics there in 1734. A disciple of Christian Wolff, in the rationalist school, Knutzen was also interested in natural sciences, and taught physics, astronomy and mathematics, besides philosophy. The study of the doctrines of Newton induced him to question Leibniz' and Wolff's theory of pre-established harmony, defending the concept of mechanical causality in the movement of physical objects; his lessons on the matter would influence the later work of Kant, who sought to reconcile the autonomy of the spiritual with the reality of the mechanical in the Critique of Judgement.
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Martin Lings
Martin Lings (also known as Abu Bakr Siraj Ad-Din) (January 24, 1909 – May 12, 2005) was an English Muslim writer and scholar, a student and follower of Frithjof Schuon, and Shakespearean scholar. He is best known as the author of a very popular and positively reviewed biography, Muhammad: His Life Based on the Earliest Sources, first published in 1983 and still in print.
Lings was born in Burnage, Manchester in 1909 to a Protestant family. The young Lings gained an introduction to travelling at a young age, spending significant time in the United States due to his father's employment. Lings attended Clifton College and went on to Magdalen College, Oxford, where he gained a BA in English Language and Literature. At Magdalen, he was a student and then a close friend of C. S. Lewis. After graduating from Oxford Lings went to Vytautas Magnus University, in Lithuania, where he taught Anglo-Saxon and Middle English.
For Lings himself, however, the most important event whilst at Oxford was his discovery of the writings of the René Guénon, a French metaphysician and Muslim convert, and those of Frithjof Schuon, a German spiritual authority, metaphysician and Perennialist. In 1938, Lings went to Basle to make Schuon's acquaintance and he remained Frithjof Schuon's disciple and expositor for the rest of his life.[citation needed]
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Matthew Kramer
Matthew Kramer is Professor of Legal and Political Philosophy at the University of Cambridge and Fellow and Director of Studies in Law at Churchill College, Cambridge.
Kramer was born in Massachusetts and educated at Cornell University (B.A.) (where he became a member of the Phi Beta Kappa Society), Harvard University (J.D.) and Cambridge (Ph.D. and LL.D.). He has advanced degrees in philosophy and law. Kramer's thirteen books as author and four as editor range over many areas of legal, political and moral philosophy. At the undergraduate level he lectures and supervises in jurisprudence, and teaches two courses in the postgraduate LL.M. program. Kramer formerly supervised in tort law, and still maintains an oversight of first-year student performance at Churchill in that field. He was a visiting professor at Hebrew University of Jerusalem in April 2009, and at Tel Aviv University in March 2012.
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Max Weber
Maximilian Karl Emil "Max" Weber (German pronunciation: [ˈmaks ˈveːbɐ]; 21 April 1864 – 14 June 1920) was a German sociologist, philosopher, and political economist who profoundly influenced social theory, social research, and the discipline of sociology itself.
Weber was a key proponent of methodological antipositivism, presenting sociology as a non-empiricist field which must study social action through interpretive means based upon understanding the meanings and purposes that individuals attach to their own actions. Weber is often cited, with Émile Durkheim and Karl Marx, as one of the three principal architects of modern social science.
Weber's main intellectual concern was understanding the processes of rationalisation, secularization, and "disenchantment" that he associated with the rise of capitalism and modernity. Weber argued that the most important difference among societies is not how people produce things but how people think about the world. In Weber’s view, modern society was the product of a new way of thinking. Weber is perhaps best known for his thesis combining economic sociology and the sociology of religion, elaborated in his book The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism. Weber proposed that ascetic Protestantism was one of the major "elective affinities" associated with the rise of capitalism, bureaucracy and the rational-legal nation-state in the Western world. Against Marx's "historical materialism," Weber emphasised the importance of cultural influences embedded in religion as a means for understanding the genesis of capitalism. The Protestant Ethic formed the earliest part in Weber's broader investigations into world religion: he would go on to examine the religions of China, the religions of India and ancient Judaism, with particular regard to the apparent non-development of capitalism in the corresponding societies, as well as to their differing forms of social stratification.
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Mazdak
Mazdak (in Persian مزدک) (died c. 524 or 528) was a proto-socialistPersian reformer and religious activist who gained influence under the reign of the Sassanian Shahanshah Kavadh I. He claimed to be a prophet of God, and instituted communal possessions and social welfare programs.
Mazdak was the chief representative of a religious and philosophical teaching called Mazdakism, which he viewed as a reformed and purified version of Zoroastrianism, although his teaching has been argued to display influences from Manichaeism as well. Zoroastrianism was the dominant religion of Sassanid Persia, and Mazdak himself was a Zoroastrian priest, or mobed, but most of the Zoroastrian clergy regarded his teaching as a heresy. Information about it is scarce and little is known beyond what is listed below; some further details may be inferred from the later doctrine of Khurramism, which has been seen as a continuation of Mazdakism.
Some sources claim that the original founders of this sect lived earlier than Mazdak. These were another mobed named Zardusht (of the same name, but not the same person as the founder of Zoroastrianism) and/or a Zoroastrian philosopher known as Mazdak the Elder, who taught a combination of altruism and hedonism: "he directed his followers to enjoy the pleasures of life and satisfy their appetite in the highest degree with regard to eating and drinking in the spirit of equality,to aim at good deeds; to abstain from shedding blood and inflicting harm on others; and to practice hospitality without reservation". This doctrine was further developed by the best known Mazdak, Mazdak the Younger, son of Bāmdād. At later stages the opposition to Mazdak blamed them for heresy and sharing women etc. which is not true. They are considered to be the first real socialists of human history who emphasized the community work and benefits for all.
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Mencius
Mencius (Chinese: 孟子; pinyin: Mèng Zǐ; Wade–Giles: Meng Tzu; Zhuyin Fuhao: ㄇㄥˋ ㄗˇ, most accepted dates: 372 – 289 BCE; other possible dates: 385 – 303/302 BCE) was a Chinese philosopher who was arguably the most famous Confucian after Confucius himself.
Mencius, also known by his birth name Meng Ke or Ko, was born in the State of Zou, now forming the territory of the county-level city of Zoucheng (originally Zouxian), Shandong province, only thirty kilometres (eighteen miles) south of Qufu, Confucius' birthplace.
He was an itinerant Chinese philosopher and sage, and one of the principal interpreters of Confucianism. Supposedly, he was a pupil of Confucius' grandson, Zisi. Like Confucius, according to legend, he travelled China for forty years to offer advice to rulers for reform. During the Warring States Period (403–221 BCE), Mencius served as an official and scholar at the Jixia Academy in the State of Qi (1046 BCE to 221 BCE) from 319 to 312 BCE. He expressed his filial devotion when he took an absence of three years from his official duties for Qi to mourn his mother's death. Disappointed at his failure to effect changes in his contemporary world, he retired from public life.
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Michael Oakeshott
Michael Joseph Oakeshott (11 December 1901 – 19 December 1990) was an English philosopher and political theorist who wrote about philosophy of history, philosophy of religion, aesthetics, and philosophy of law. He is widely regarded as one of the most important conservative thinkers of the 20th century, although he has sometimes been characterized as a liberal thinker.
His father, Joseph Oakeshott, was a civil servant and a leading member of the Fabian Society. George Bernard Shaw was a friend. Michael Oakeshott attended St. George's School, Harpenden from 1912 to 1920. He enjoyed his schooldays, and the Headmaster Cecil Grant later became a friend.[citation needed]
In 1920 he went to Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge to read history, obtaining his MA, and subsequently became a Fellow. While at Cambridge, he admired the British Idealist philosopher, J. M. E. McTaggart, and the medieval historian Zachary Nugent Brooke. The historian Herbert Butterfield was a contemporary and fellow member of the Junior Historians society.[citation needed]
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Michael Walzer
Michael Walzer (pronounced /ˈwɔːlzər/; March 3, 1935) is a prominent American political philosopher and public intellectual. A professor emeritus at the Institute for Advanced Study (IAS) in Princeton, New Jersey, he is co-editor of Dissent, an intellectual magazine that he has been affiliated with since his years as an undergraduate at Brandeis University. He has written books and essays on a wide range of topics, including just and unjust wars, nationalism, ethnicity, economic justice, social criticism, radicalism, tolerance, and political obligation and is a contributing editor to The New Republic. To date, he has written 27 books and published over 300 articles, essays, and book reviews in Dissent, The New Republic, The New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, The New York Times, "Harpers," and many philosophical and political science journals.
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Michel de Montaigne
Michel Eyquem de Montaigne (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl ekɛm də mɔ̃tɛɲ]), February 28, 1533 – September 13, 1592, was one of the most influential writers of the French Renaissance, known for popularising the essay as a literary genre and is popularly thought of as the father of Modern Skepticism. He became famous for his effortless ability to merge serious intellectual speculation with casual anecdotes and autobiography—and his massive volume Essais (translated literally as "Attempts") contains, to this day, some of the most widely influential essays ever written. Montaigne had a direct influence on writers the world over, including René Descartes,Blaise Pascal, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, Stefan Zweig, Eric Hoffer,Isaac Asimov, and possibly on the later works of William Shakespeare.
In his own time, Montaigne was admired more as a statesman than as an author. The tendency in his essays to digress into anecdotes and personal ruminations was seen as detrimental to proper style rather than as an innovation, and his declaration that, 'I am myself the matter of my book', was viewed by his contemporaries as self-indulgent. In time, however, Montaigne would be recognized as embodying, perhaps better than any other author of his time, the spirit of freely entertaining doubt which began to emerge at that time. He is most famously known for his skeptical remark, 'Que sçay-je?' ('What do I know?' in Middle French; modern French Que sais-je?). Remarkably modern even to readers today, Montaigne's attempt to examine the world through the lens of the only thing he can depend on implicitly—his own judgment—makes him more accessible to modern readers than any other author of the Renaissance. Much of modern literary non-fiction has found inspiration in Montaigne and writers of all kinds continue to read him for his masterful balance of intellectual knowledge and personal story-telling.
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Michel Foucault
Michel Foucault (French pronunciation: [miʃɛl fuko]), born Paul-Michel Foucault (15 October 1926 – 25 June 1984) was a French philosopher, social theorist and historian of ideas. He held a chair at the Collège de France with the title "History of Systems of Thought," and lectured at the University at Buffalo and the University of California, Berkeley.
Foucault is best known for his critical studies of social institutions, most notably psychiatry, social anthropology of medicine, the human sciences and the prison system, as well as for his work on the history of human sexuality. His writings on power, knowledge, and discourse have been widely influential in academic circles.
In the 1960s, he was associated with structuralism, a theoretical movement in social anthropology from which he later distanced himself. He also rejected the poststructuralist and postmodernist labels later attributed to him, preferring to classify his thought as a critical history of modernity rooted in Immanuel Kant. His project was particularly influenced by Nietzsche, his "genealogy of knowledge" being a direct allusion to Nietzsche's "genealogy of morality". In a late interview he definitively stated: "I am a Nietzschean."
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Milovan Đilas
Milovan Đilas (pronounced [mîlɔʋan dʑîlaːs], Serbian Cyrillic: Милован Ђилас; June 4, 1911, Podbišće (Mojkovac) – April 20, 1995, Belgrade) was a YugoslavCommunist politician, theorist and author from Montenegro. He was a key figure in the Partisan movement during World War II, as in the post-war government. A self-identified Democratic Socialist, Đilas became one of the best-known and prominent dissidents in Yugoslavia and the whole Eastern Bloc.
Born in Polje village (Kolašin municipality) in the Kingdom of Montenegro, he joined the Communist Party of Yugoslavia as a Belgrade University student in 1932. He was a political prisoner from 1933 to 1936. In 1938 he was elected to the Central Committee of the Communist Party and became a member of its Politburo in 1940.
In April 1941, as Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy and their allies defeated the Royal Yugoslav army and dismembered the Kingdom of Yugoslavia, Đilas helped Josip Broz Tito found the Partisan resistance, and was a guerilla commander during the war. Following Germany's attack on the Soviet Union on June 22 (Operation Barbarossa), the Communist Party of Yugoslavia's (KPJ) Central Committee decided that conditions had been created for armed struggle and on July 4 passed the resolution to begin the uprising.
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Mircea Eliade
Mircea Eliade (Romanian pronunciation: [ˈmirt͡ʃe̯a eliˈade]; March 13 [O.S. February 28] 1907 – April 22, 1986) was a Romanian historian of religion, fiction writer, philosopher, and professor at the University of Chicago. He was a leading interpreter of religious experience, who established paradigms in religious studies that persist to this day. His theory that hierophanies form the basis of religion, splitting the human experience of reality into sacred and profane space and time, has proved influential. One of his most influential contributions to religious studies was his theory of Eternal Return, which holds that myths and rituals do not simply commemorate hierophanies, but, at least to the minds of the religious, actually participate in them.
His literary works belong to the fantasy and autobiographical genres. The best known are the novels Maitreyi ("La Nuit Bengali" or "Bengal Nights"), Noaptea de Sânziene ("The Forbidden Forest"), Isabel şi apele diavolului ("Isabel and the Devil's Waters") and the Novel of the Nearsighted Adolescent, the novellas Domnişoara Christina ("Miss Christina") and Tinereţe fără tinereţe ("Youth Without Youth"), and the short stories Secretul doctorului Honigberger ("The Secret of Dr. Honigberger") and La Ţigănci ("With the Gypsy Girls").
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Moses Mendelssohn
Moses Mendelssohn (6 September 1729 – 4 January 1786) was a German Jewish philosopher to whose ideas Haskalah (the Jewish Enlightenment) is indebted. Although himself a practicing orthodox Jew, he has been referred to as the father of Reform Judaism.
Born to a poor Jewish family in Dessau and originally destined for a rabbinical career, Mendelssohn educated himself in German thought and literature and from his writings on philosophy and religion came to be regarded as a leading cultural figure of his time by both Germans and Jews. He also established himself as an important figure in the Berlin textile industry, which was the foundation of his family's wealth.
Moses Mendelssohn's descendants include the composers Fanny and Felix Mendelssohn and the founders of the Mendelssohn & Co. banking house.
Moses Mendelssohn was born in Dessau. His father's name was Mendel and he later took the surname Mendelssohn ("Mendel's son"). Mendel Dessau was a poor scribe—a writer of torah scrolls—and his son Moses in his boyhood developed curvature of the spine. His early education was cared for by his father and by the local rabbi, David Fränkel, who besides teaching him the Bible and Talmud, introduced to him the philosophy of Maimonides. Fränkel received a call to Berlin in 1743. A few months later Moses followed him.
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Mozi
Mozi (Chinese: 墨子; pinyin: Mòzǐ; Wade–Giles: Mo Tzu, Lat. as Micius, ca. 470 BC – ca. 391 BC), original name Mo Di (墨翟), was a Chinese philosopher during the Hundred Schools of Thought period (early Warring States Period). Born in Tengzhou, Shandong Province, China, he founded the school of Mohism, and argued strongly against Confucianism and Daoism. During the Warring States Period, Mohism was actively developed and practiced in many states, but fell out of favour when the legalist Qin Dynasty came to power. During that period, many Mohist classics were ruined when Qin Shi Huang carried out the burning of books and burying of scholars. The importance of Mohism further declined when Confucianism became the dominant school of thought during the Han Dynasty, until mostly disappearing by the middle of the Western Han Dynasty. Mozi is known by children throughout Chinese culture by way of the Thousand Character Classic, which records that he was saddened when he saw dyeing of pure white silk, which embodied his conception of austerity (simplicity, chastity).
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Neil MacCormick
Sir (Donald) Neil MacCormick, QC, FBA, FRSE (27 May 1941 – 5 April 2009), or just Neil MacCormick, was a legal philosopher and Scottish politician. He was Regius Professor of Public Law and the Law of Nature and Nations at the University of Edinburgh from 1972 until 2008. He was a sometime Member of the European Parliament, member of the Convention on the Future of Europe, and officer of the Scottish National Party (SNP).
Born 27 May 1941, he was the son of one of the SNP's founders, John MacCormick. He read for an M.A. in Philosophy and English Literature at the University of Glasgow, before benefiting from a Snell Exhibition and taking the B.A. in Jurisprudence at Balliol College, Oxford. At Oxford, MacCormick came under the influence of Professor H. L. A. Hart, and developed an interest in legal philosophy. In 1982 he was awarded the research degree of LL.D. by Edinburgh. He was a member of the Broadcasting Council for Scotland, of the Economic and Social Research Council, of the Research Council of the European University Institute, and of the European Science Foundation, as well as of various government departmental committees inquiring into matters of public concern. In 1999, MacCormick was appointed Queen's Counsel 'honoris causa', and was knighted in the Queen's Birthday Honours in 2001 in recognition of services to scholarship in Law. In 2004 he was a recipient of the Royal Society of Edinburgh's Royal Gold Medal for Outstanding Achievement. He was the recipient of honorary degrees from Queen’s University (Canada), Uppsala University (Sweden), University of Macerata (Italy) and Saarland University (Germany), as well as from Glasgow University, Queen Margaret University and Edinburgh University. He was president of the International Association for Philosophy of Law and Social Philosophy. Just after retiring from his chair at Edinburgh University in 2008, MacCormick was diagnosed with inoperable cancer.
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Nelson Goodman
Henry Nelson Goodman (7 August 1906, Somerville, Massachusetts – 25 November 1998, Needham, Massachusetts) was an American philosopher, known for his work on counterfactuals, mereology, the problem of induction, irrealism and aesthetics.
Goodman graduated from Harvard University, A.B., magna cum laude (1928). During the 1930s, he ran an art gallery in Boston, Massachusetts while studying for a Harvard Ph.D. in philosophy, which he completed in 1941. His experience as an art dealer helps explain his later turn towards aesthetics, where he became better known than in logic and analytic philosophy. During World War II, he served in the US Army.
He taught at the University of Pennsylvania, 1946–1964, where his students included Noam Chomsky, Sydney Morgenbesser, and Hilary Putnam. He left Penn because he was not granted the control he desired over the philosophy department. He was a research fellow at the Harvard Center for Cognitive Studies from 1962 to 1963 and was a Professor at several universities from 1964 to 1967, before being appointed Professor of Philosophy at Harvard in 1968.
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Niccolò Machiavelli
Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli (Italian pronunciation: [nikkoˌlɔ makjaˈvɛlli], 3 May 1469 – 21 June 1527) was an Italian historian, diplomat, philosopher, humanist and writer based in Florence during the Renaissance. A founder of modern political science, he was a diplomat, political philosopher, playwright, and a civil servant of the Florentine Republic. He also wrote comedies, carnival songs, and poetry. His personal correspondence is renowned in the Italian language. He was Secretary to the Second Chancery of the Republic of Florence from 1498 to 1512, when the Medici were out of power. He wrote his masterpiece, The Prince after the Medici had recovered power and he no longer held a position of responsibility in Florence, and is respectively interpreted by many as a satire of these powers.
Machiavelli was born in Florence, Italy, the first son and third child of attorney, Bernardo di Niccolò Machiavelli, and his wife, Bartolomea di Stefano Nelli. The Machiavelli family are believed to be descended from the old marquesses of Tuscany and to have produced thirteen Florentine Gonfalonieres of Justice, one of the offices of a group of nine citizens selected by drawing lots every two months, who formed the government, or Signoria. Machiavelli, like many people of Florence, was however not a full citizen of Florence, due to the nature of Florentine citizenship in that time, even under the republican regime.
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Nicolai Hartmann
Nicolai Hartmann (Latvian: Nikolajs Hartmanis; 20 February 1882 in Riga, Livonia Governorate, Russian Empire – 9 October 1950 in Göttingen, West Germany) was a Baltic German philosopher.
Hartmann was born of German descent in Riga, which was then the capital of the Russian province of Livonia, and which is now in Latvia. He studied Medicine at the University of Tartu (then Jurjev), then Philosophy in St. Petersburg and at the University of Marburg in Germany, where he took his Ph.D. and Habilitation. He was professor of philosophy in Marburg (1922–25), Cologne (1925–31), Berlin (1931–45) and Göttingen (1945–50), where he died. Originally a Marburg neo-Kantian, studying under Hermann Cohen and Paul Natorp, Hartmann developed his own philosophy which has been described as a variety of existentialism or critical realism. Among Hartmann's many students were Boris Pasternak, Hans-Georg Gadamer, Émil Cioran, Jakob Klein, Delfim Santos and Max Wehrli. He is the modern discoverer of emergence — originally called by him categorial novum. His encyclopedic work is basically forgotten today, although famous during his lifetime. His early work in the philosophy of biology has been cited in modern discussions of genomics and cloning, and his views on consciousness and free will are currently in vogue among contributors to the Journal of Consciousness Studies.
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Nicolas Malebranche
Nicolas Malebranche French pronunciation: [nikɔˈlɑ malˈbrɑ̃ʃ]; (6 August 1638 – 13 October 1715) was a French Oratorian and rationalist philosopher. In his works, he sought to synthesize the thought of St. Augustine and Descartes, in order to demonstrate the active role of God in every aspect of the world. Malebranche is best known for his doctrines of Vision in God and Occasionalism. Known by many as "The Occasional Philosopher" a term coined by David Hume, Malebranche's sworn adversary.
Nicolas Malebranche was born in Paris in 1638, the youngest child of Nicolas Malebranche, secretary to King Louis XIII of France, and Catherine de Lauzon, sister of a Jean de Lauson, Governor of New France. Because of a malformed spine, Malebranche received his elementary education from a private tutor. He left home at the age of sixteen to pursue a course of philosophy at the Collège de la Marche, and subsequently to study theology at the Collège de Sorbonne, both colleges from the University of Paris. He eventually left the Sorbonne, having rejected scholasticism, and entered the Oratory in 1660. There, he devoted himself to ecclesiastical history, linguistics, the Bible, and the works of Saint Augustine. Malebranche was ordained a priest in 1664.
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Nigel Simmonds
Nigel Simmonds is Reader in Jurisprudence at the University of Cambridge and Dean of College and Director of Studies in Law at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge.
Dr. Simmonds attended school (one of the first comprehensive schools in Britain) in Cumberland before going up to study law at Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge in 1970. He was placed in the First Class in each of the three years of his undergraduate study, coming top of Tripos and gaining a starred First in his Finals. He then studied for the LL.M where he once again attained a First Class. After a Phd and some years of teaching at Manchester University, he returned to Cambridge where he is now University Reader in Jurisprudence. At Corpus, Nigel is the Director of Studies in Law, and Dean of College. Nigel Simmonds specialises in Jurisprudence (the philosophy of law). He has published several books and numerous articles in legal and philosophical journals. Recent books include 'A Debate Over Rights' (Oxford 2000), 'Central Issues in Jurisprudence' (3rd edition, London 2008) and 'Law as a Moral Idea' (2007; paperback 2008).
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Niklas Luhmann
Niklas Luhmann (December 8, 1927 - November 6, 1998) was a German sociologist, and a prominent thinker in sociological systems theory.
Luhmann was born in Lüneburg, Lower Saxony, where his father's family had been running a brewery for several generations. After graduating from the Johanneum school in 1943, he was conscripted as a Luftwaffenhelfer in World War II and served for two years until, at the age of 17, he was taken prisoner of war by American troops in 1945. After the war Luhmann studied law at the University of Freiburg from 1946 to 1949, when he obtained a law degree, and then began a career in Lüneburg's public administration. During a sabbatical in 1961, he went to Harvard, where he met and studied under Talcott Parsons, then the world's most influential social systems theorist.
In later years, Luhmann dismissed Parsons' theory, developing a rival approach of his own. Leaving the civil service in 1962, he lectured at the national Deutsche Hochschule für Verwaltungswissenschaften (University for Administrative Sciences) in Speyer, Germany, until 1965, when he was offered a position at the Sozialforschungsstelle (Social Research Centre) of the University of Münster, led by Helmut Schelsky. 1965/66 he studied one semester of sociology at the University of Münster.
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Noam Chomsky
Avram Noam Chomsky (/ˈnoʊm ˈtʃɒmski/; born December 7, 1928) is an American linguist, philosopher,cognitive scientist, historian, and activist. He is an Institute Professor and Professor (Emeritus) in the Department of Linguistics & Philosophy at MIT, where he has worked for over 50 years. Chomsky has been described as the "father of modern linguistics" and a major figure of analytic philosophy. His work has influenced fields such as computer science, mathematics, and psychology.
Ideologically identifying with anarcho-syndicalism and libertarian socialism, Chomsky is known for his critiques of U.S. foreign policy and contemporary capitalism, and he has been described as a prominent cultural figure. His media criticism has included Manufacturing Consent: The Political Economy of the Mass Media (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.
According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992, and was the eighth most cited source overall. Chomsky is the author of over 100 books. He is credited as the creator or co-creator of the Chomsky hierarchy, the universal grammar theory, and the Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem.
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Norberto Bobbio
Norberto Bobbio (Italian pronunciation: [norˈbɛrto ˈbɔbbjo]; October 18, 1909 – January 9, 2004) was an Italian philosopher of law and political sciences and a historian of political thought. He also wrote regularly for the Turin-based daily La Stampa. Bobbio was a liberal socialist in the tradition of Piero Gobetti, Carlo Rosselli, Guido Calogero, and Aldo Capitini. He was also strongly influenced by Hans Kelsen and Vilfredo Pareto.
Bobbio was born into what his Guardian obituary described as "...a relatively wealthy, middle-class Turin family" whose sympathies Bobbio would later characterize as "philo-fascist, regarding fascism as a necessary evil against the supposedly greater danger of Bolshevism". In high school he met Vittorio Foa, Leone Ginzburg and Cesare Pavese, and at university he became a friend of Alessandro Galante Garrone.
In 1942, under the Fascist regime of Benito Mussolini and during World War II, Bobbio joined the then illegal radical liberal party Partito d'Azione ("Party of Action") and was briefly imprisoned in 1943 and 1944. He ran unsuccessfully in the 1946 Constituent Assembly of Italy elections. With the party's failure in a post-war Italy dominated by the Christian Democrats, Bobbio left electoral politics and focused back in academia.
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Novalis
Novalis (German pronunciation: [noˈvaːlɪs]) was the pseudonym of Georg Philipp Friedrich Freiherr von Hardenberg (May 2, 1772 – March 25, 1801), an author and philosopher of early German Romanticism.
Georg Philipp Friedrich von Hardenberg was born in 1772 at Oberwiederstedt manor (now part of Arnstein, Saxony-Anhalt), in the Harz mountains. The family seat was a manorial estate, not simply a stately home. Novalis descended from ancient, Low German nobility. Different lines of the family include such important, influential magistrates and ministry officials as the Prussian chancellor Karl August von Hardenberg (1750–1822). An oil painting and a christening cap commonly assigned to Novalis are his only possessions now extant. In the church in Wiederstedt, he was christened Georg Philipp Friedrich. He spent his childhood on the family estate and used it as the starting point for his travels into the Harz mountains.
Novalis’s father, the estate owner and salt-mine manager Heinrich Ulrich Erasmus Freiherr von Hardenberg (1738–1814), was a strictly pietistic man who had become a member of the Moravian (Herrnhuter) Church. His second marriage was to Auguste Bernhardine von Hardenberg, née Bölzig (1749–1818), who gave birth to eleven children: their second child was Georg Philipp Friedrich, who later named himself Novalis.
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Otto Liebmann
Otto Liebmann (2 February 1840 - 14 January 1912) was a German philosopher.
He was born at Löwenberg and educated at Leipzig and Halle. He was made professor at Strassbnrg (1872) and went to Jena in 1882.
A forerunner of Neo-Kantianism, in his best known book, Kant und die Epigonen, he deals with the philosophy after Kant, discussing Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, Fries, Herbart and Schopenhauer. Having credited Kants philosophy (though criticizing it on the vital point of accepting a thing-in-itself), he focuses on what he sees as the shortcomings in the approaches of Kants successors. He frequently ends a section with the statement that one should return to Kant.
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Otto Neurath
Otto Neurath (Vienna, December 10, 1882 - Oxford, December 22, 1945) was an Austrian philosopher of science, sociologist, and political economist. Before he was to flee his native country in 1934, Neurath was one of the leading figures of the Vienna Circle.
Neurath was born in Vienna, the son of Wilhelm Neurath (1840–1901), a well-known political economist at the time. He studied mathematics in Vienna and gained his Ph.D. in the department of Political Science and Statistics at the University of Berlin.
He married Anna Schapire in 1907. She died as a result of childbirth (Paul Neurath) in 1911, and he married a close friend, the mathematician and philosopher Olga Hahn. Perhaps because of Olga's blindness and then because of the outbreak of war, his son, Paul Neurath was sent to a children's home outside Vienna, where Neurath's mother lived, and returned to live with his father and Olga when he was nine years old.
Neurath taught political economy at the Neue Wiener Handelsakademie (New College of Commerce, Vienna) until war broke out. Subsequently he became director of the Deutsches Kriegwirtschaftsmuseum (German Museum of War Economy, later the Deutsches Wirtschaftmuseum) at Leipzig. Wolfgang Schumann, known from the Dürerbund for which Neurath had written many articles, urged him to work out a plan for socialization. Neurath joined the German Social Democratic Party in 1918-19 and ran an office for central economic planning in Munich. When the Bavarian Soviet Republic was defeated, Neurath was imprisoned but returned to Austria after intervention from the Austrian government. While in prison he wrote "Anti-Spengler", a critical attack on Oswald Spengler's "Decline of the West".
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Otto Weininger
Otto Weininger (April 3, 1880 – October 4, 1903) was an Austrian philosopher. In 1903, he published the book Geschlecht und Charakter (Sex and Character), which gained popularity after his suicide at the age of 23. Today, Weininger is generally viewed as misogynistic and antisemitic in academic circles, but was held to be a great genius by the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein and the writer August Strindberg (see discussion below).
Otto Weininger was born on April 3, 1880 in Vienna as a son of the Jewish goldsmith Leopold Weininger and his wife Adelheid. After attending primary school and graduating from secondary school in July 1898, Weininger registered at the University of Vienna in October of the same year. He studied philosophy and psychology but took courses in natural sciences and medicine as well. Weininger learned Greek, Latin, French and English very early, later also Spanish and Italian, and acquired passive knowledge of the languages of August Strindberg and Henrik Ibsen (i.e., Swedish and Danish/Norwegian).
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Parmenides
Parmenides of Elea ( /pɑrˈmɛnɨdiːz əv ˈɛliə/; Ancient Greek: Παρμενίδης ὁ Ἐλεάτης; fl. early 5th century BC) was an ancient Greek philosopher born in Elea, a Greek city on the southern coast of Italy. He was the founder of the Eleatic school of philosophy. The single known work of Parmenides is a poem, On Nature, which has survived only in fragmentary form. In this poem, Parmenides describes two views of reality. In "the way of truth" (a part of the poem), he explains how reality (coined as "what-is") is one, change is impossible, and existence is timeless, uniform, necessary, and unchanging. In "the way of opinion," he explains the world of appearances, in which one's sensory faculties lead to conceptions which are false and deceitful. These ideas strongly influenced the whole of Western philosophy, perhaps most notably through its effect on Plato.
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Paul Feyerabend
Paul Karl Feyerabend (January 13, 1924 – February 11, 1994) was an Austrian-born philosopher of science best known for his work as a professor of philosophy at the University of California, Berkeley, where he worked for three decades (1958–1989). He lived a peripatetic life, living at various times in England, the United States, New Zealand, Italy, Germany, and finally Switzerland. His major works include Against Method (published in 1975), Science in a Free Society (published in 1978) and Farewell to Reason (a collection of papers published in 1987). Feyerabend became famous for his purportedly anarchistic view of science and his rejection of the existence of universal methodological rules. He is an influential figure in the philosophy of science, and also in the sociology of scientific knowledge.
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Paul Grice
Herbert Paul Grice (March 13, 1913, Birmingham, England – August 28, 1988, Berkeley, California), usually publishing under the name H. P. Grice, H. Paul Grice, or Paul Grice, was a British-educated philosopher of language, who spent the final two decades of his career in the United States.
Born and raised in Harborne (now a suburb of Birmingham), in the United Kingdom, he was educated at Clifton College and then at Corpus Christi College, Oxford. After a brief period teaching at Rossall School, he went back to Oxford where he taught until 1967. In that year, he moved to the United States to take up a professorship at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught until his death in 1988. He returned to the UK in 1979 to give the John Locke lectures on Aspects of Reason. He reprinted many of his essays and papers in his valedictory book, Studies in the Way of Words (1989).
He was married and had two children. He and his wife lived in an old Spanish style house in the Berkeley Hills.[citation needed]
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Paul Guyer
Paul Guyer, a Professor of Philosophy and F.R.C. Murray Professor in the Humanities at the University of Pennsylvania, is one of the world's foremost scholars of Kant. Guyer also serves on the Graduate Groups for both Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature. Prior to moving to the University of Pennsylvania, he taught at the University of Pittsburgh and the University of Illinois, Chicago. Paul Guyer has now agreed to move from the University of Pennsylvania to Brown University.
Guyer has written several books on Kant and Kantian themes, and has edited and translated a number of Kant's works into English. In addition to his work on Kant, Guyer has published on many other figures in the history of philosophy, including Locke, Hume, Hegel, Schopenhauer, and others. Guyer's Kant and The Claims of Knowledge (Cambridge University Press) is widely considered to be one of the most significant works in Kant scholarship. Princeton University Press recently released Guyer's new work, Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. He is one of the general editors of the Cambridge Edition of Kant's works in translation. His other areas of specialty include the history of philosophy and aesthetics. Guyer has just been elected Vice-President of the American Society for Aesthetics for 2009-11, which will be followed by a term as President for 2011-13 (and then as Past President for 2013-15). Professor Guyer has also recently been appointed Vice-President of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, which will be followed by a term as President, and finally a term as Past-President. Guyer is one of few to hold two major professional appointments concurrently.
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Paul Häberlin
Paul Haeberlin (February 17, 1878, Kesswil – September 29, 1960, Basel) was a Swiss philosopher who at different times in his career took the standpoint that either religion or theoretical knowledge was the answer to human problems. He always gave philosophy an important role, but religion was to him the only way man could understand his real position in existence. Haeberlin made contributions to characterology and psychotherapeutics, and was especially successful in treating psychopathic youth and teens. Made a full professor of philosophy, psychology and pedagogics at the University of Basel.
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Paul Klee
Paul Klee (German pronunciation: [ˈkleː]; 18 December 1879 – 29 June 1940) was born in Münchenbuchsee, Switzerland, and is considered both a German and a Swisspainter. His highly individual style was influenced by movements in art that included expressionism, cubism, and surrealism. He was, as well, a student of orientalism. Klee was a natural draftsman who experimented with and eventually mastered colour theory, and wrote extensively about it; his lectures Writings on Form and Design Theory (Schriften zur Form und Gestaltungslehre), published in English as the Paul Klee Notebooks, are considered so important for modern art that they are compared to the importance that Leonardo da Vinci's A Treatise on Painting had for Renaissance. He and his colleague, the Russian painter Wassily Kandinsky, both taught at the German Bauhaus school of art, design and architecture. His works reflect his dry humour and his sometimes childlike perspective, his personal moods and beliefs, and his musicality.
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Paul Natorp
Paul Gerhard Natorp (24 January 1854-17 August 1924) was a German philosopher and educationalist, considered one of the co-founders of the Marburg school of neo-Kantianism. He was known as an authority on Plato.
Paul Natorp was born in Düsseldorf, the son of the Protestant minister Adelbert Natorp and his wife Emilie Keller. From 1871 he studied music, history, classical philology and philosophy in Berlin, Bonn and Strasbourg. He completed his dissertation in 1876 in Strasbourg under the supervision of the positivist Ernst Laas and in 1881 completed his Habilitation under Hermann Cohen. In 1885 he became extraordinary professor and in 1893 became ordinary professor in philosophy and pedagogics at Marburg University, a position he retained until his retirement in 1922. In the winter semester of 1923-24 Natorp conducted an intensive exchange of ideas with Martin Heidegger, who had been called to Marburg and whose work on Duns Scotus Natorp had read very early on. In 1887 he married his cousin Helene Natorp; they had five children. Natorp was an ambitious composer, who wrote chiefly chamber music (including a cello sonata, a violin sonata, and a piano trio). He also wrote some 100 songs and two choral works. He conducted a correspondence with Johannes Brahms, who dissuaded him from becoming a professional composer.
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Paul Tillich
Paul Johannes Tillich (August 20, 1886 – October 22, 1965) was a German-American theologian and Christian existentialist philosopher. Tillich was one of the most influential Protestant theologians of the 20th century. Among the general public, he is best known for his works The Courage to Be (1952) and Dynamics of Faith (1957), which introduced issues of theology and modern culture to a general readership. Theologically, he is best known for his major three-volume work Systematic Theology (1951–63), in which he developed his "method of correlation": an approach of exploring the symbols of Christian revelation as answers to the problems of human existence raised by contemporary existential philosophical analysis.
Tillich was born on August 20, 1886, in the small village of Starzeddel Silesia which was then part of Germany. He was the oldest of three children, with two sisters: Johanna (b. 1888, d. 1920) and Elisabeth (b. 1893). Tillich’s Prussian father Johannes Tillich was a conservative Lutheran pastor of the Evangelical State Church of Prussia's older Provinces; his mother Mathilde Dürselen was from the Rhineland and was more liberal. When Tillich was four, his father became superintendent of a diocese in Schönfliess, a town of three thousand, where Tillich began elementary school. In 1898, Tillich was sent to Königsberg Chojna to begin gymnasium. At Königsberg, he lived in a boarding house and experienced loneliness that he sought to overcome by reading the Bible. Simultaneously, however, he was exposed to humanistic ideas at school.
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Pavel Florensky
Pavel Alexandrovich Florensky (also P.A. Florenskiĭ, Florenskii, Florenskij, Russian: Па́вел Алекса́ндрович Флоре́нский) (January 21 [O.S. January 9] 1882 - December 1937) was a Russian Orthodox theologian, priest, philosopher, mathematician, physicist, electrical engineer, inventor and Neomartyr.
Pavel Aleksandrovich Florensky was born on January 21, 1882, into the family of a railroad engineer, (Aleksandr Florensky) in the town of Yevlakh in western Azerbaijan. His father came from a family of Russian Orthodox priests while his mother Olga (Salomia) Saparova (Saparyan, Sapharashvili) was of the Tbilisi Armenian nobility. His maternal grandmother Sofia Paatova (Paatashvili) was from Sighnaghi, Georgia. Florensky "always searched for the roots of his Armenian family" and noted that they're coming from Karabakh.
After graduating from Tbilisi gymnasium in 1899, Florensky entered the department of mathematics of Moscow State University and simultaneously studied philosophy. During this period the young Florensky, who had no religious upbringing, began taking an interest in studies beyond "the limitations of physical knowledge..." In 1904 he graduated from Moscow State University and declined a teaching position at the University: instead, he proceeded to study theology at the Ecclesiastical Academy in Sergiyev Posad. During his theological study, he first came into contact with who would become his spiritual father and mentor, Elder Isidore on a visit to Gethsemane Hermitage. Together with fellow students Ern, Svenitsky and Brikhnichev he founded a society, the Christian Struggle Union (Союз Христиaнской Борьбы), with the revolutionary aim of rebuilding Russian society according to the principles of Vladimir Solovyov. Subsequently he was arrested for membership in this society in 1906: however, he later lost his interest in the Radical Christianity movement.
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Peter Geach
Peter Thomas Geach, MA, FBA ( /ˈɡiːtʃ/; born 29 March 1916) is a British philosopher. His areas of interest are the history of philosophy, philosophical logic, and the theory of identity.
Geach was educated at Balliol College, Oxford. He taught at Birmingham University (1951–1966) and from 1966 at the University of Leeds where he was Professor of Logic in the Department of Philosophy. Geach was given the title of Emeritus Professor of Logic on his retirement in 1981.
Geach was elected a Fellow of the British Academy (FBA) in 1965.
He has been awarded the papal cross "Pro Ecclesia et Pontifice" by the Holy See for his philosophical work.
His early work includes the classic texts Mental Acts and Reference and Generality, the latter defending an essentially modern conception of reference against medieval theories of supposition.
His Catholic perspective is integral to his philosophy. He is perhaps the founder of Analytical Thomism (though the current of thought running through his and Elizabeth Anscombe's work to the present day was only ostensibly so named forty years later by John Haldane), the aim of which is to synthesise Thomistic and Analytic approaches. He defends the Thomistic position that human beings are essentially rational animals, each one miraculously created. He dismisses Darwinistic attempts to regard reason as inessential to humanity, as "mere sophistry, laughable, or pitiable." He repudiates any capacity for language in animals as mere "association of manual signs with things or performances."
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Peter Singer
Peter Albert David Singer (born 6 July 1946) is an Australian philosopher who is the Ira W. DeCamp Professor of Bioethics at Princeton University and Laureate Professor at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics at the University of Melbourne. He specialises in applied ethics and approaches ethical issues from a secular, preference utilitarian perspective.
He has served, on two occasions, as chair of philosophy at Monash University, where he founded its Centre for Human Bioethics. In 1996, he unsuccessfully stood as a Greens candidate for the Australian Senate. In 2004, he was recognised as the Australian Humanist of the Year by the Council of Australian Humanist Societies. He has been voted one of Australia's ten most influential public intellectuals. Singer serves on the Advisory Board of Incentives for Global Health, the NGO formed to develop the Health Impact Fund proposal.
Outside academic circles, Singer is best known for his book Animal Liberation, widely regarded as the touchstone of the animal liberation movement. Not all members of the animal liberation movement share this view, and Singer himself has said the media overstates his status. His views on that and other issues in bioethics have attracted attention and a degree of controversy.
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Philippa Foot
Philippa Ruth Foot (née Bosanquet; 3 October 1920 – 3 October 2010) was a British philosopher, most notable for her works in ethics. She was one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. Her later career marked a significant change in view from her work in the 1950s and 1960s, and may be seen as an attempt to modernize Aristotelian ethical theory, to show that it is adaptable to a contemporary world view, and thus, that it could compete with such popular theories as modern deontological and utilitarian ethics. Some of her work was crucial in the re-emergence of normative ethics within analytic philosophy, especially her critique of consequentialism. A familiar example is the continuing discussion of an example of hers referred to as the trolley problem. Foot's approach was influenced by the later work of Wittgenstein, although she rarely dealt explicitly with materials treated by him.
Foot's works of the late 1950s were meta-ethical in character: that is, they pertained to the status of moral judgment and speech. The essays Moral Arguments and Moral Beliefs, in particular, were crucial in overturning the rule of non-cognitivism in analytic approaches to ethical theory in the preceding decades.
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Pierre Duhem
Pierre Maurice Marie Duhem ([pjˈɛʁ moʁˈis maʁˈi dyˈɛm] ( listen); 9 June 1861 – 14 September 1916) was a French physicist, mathematician and philosopher of science, best known for his writings on the indeterminacy of experimental criteria and on scientific development in the Middle Ages. Duhem also made major contributions to the science of his day, particularly in the fields of hydrodynamics, elasticity, and thermodynamics.
Duhem's views on the philosophy of science are explicated in The Aim and Structure of Physical Theory. In this work, he opposed Newton's statement that the Principia's law of universal mutual gravitation was deduced from 'phenomena', including Kepler's second and third laws. Newton's claims in this regard had already been attacked by critical proof-analyses of the German logician Leibniz and then most famously by Immanuel Kant, following Hume's logical critique of induction. But the novelty of Duhem's work was his proposal that Newton's theory of universal mutual gravity flatly contradicted Kepler's Laws of planetary motion because the interplanetary mutual gravitational perturbations caused deviations from Keplerian orbits. Since no proposition can be validly logically deduced from any it contradicts, according to Duhem, Newton must not have logically deduced his law of gravitation directly from Kepler's Laws.
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Pierre Gassendi
Pierre Gassendi (January 22, 1592 – October 24, 1655) was a French philosopher, priest, scientist, astronomer, and mathematician. With a church position in south-east France, he also spent much time in Paris, where he was a leader of a group of free-thinking intellectuals. He was also an active observational scientist, publishing the first data on the transit of Mercury in 1631. The lunar crater Gassendi is named after him.
He wrote numerous philosophical works, and some of the positions he worked out are considered significant, finding a way between scepticism and dogmatism. Richard Popkin indicates that Gassendi was one of the first thinkers to formulate the modern "scientific outlook", of moderated scepticism and empiricism. He clashed with his contemporary Descartes on the possibility of certain knowledge. His best known intellectual project attempted to reconcile Epicurean atomism with Christianity.
Gassendi was born at Champtercier, near Digne, in France. A youthful prodigy, at a very early age he showed academic potential and attended the college at Digne, where he displayed a particular aptitude for languages and mathematics. Soon afterwards he entered the University of Aix-en-Provence, to study philosophy under Philibert Fesaye. In 1612 the college of Digne called him to lecture on theology. Four years later he received the degree of Doctor of Theology at Avignon, and in 1617 he took holy orders. In the same year he answered a call to the chair of philosophy at Aix-en-Provence University, and seems gradually to have withdrawn from theology.
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Plato
Plato ( /ˈpleɪtoʊ/; Greek: Πλάτων, Plátōn, "broad"; 424/423 BC – 348/347 BC) was a Classical Greek philosopher, mathematician, student of Socrates, writer of philosophical dialogues, and founder of the Academy in Athens, the first institution of higher learning in the Western world. Along with his mentor, Socrates, and his student, Aristotle, Plato helped to lay the foundations of Western philosophy and science. In the words of A. N. Whitehead:
The safest general characterization of the European philosophical tradition is that it consists of a series of footnotes to Plato. I do not mean the systematic scheme of thought which scholars have doubtfully extracted from his writings. I allude to the wealth of general ideas scattered through them.
Plato's sophistication as a writer is evident in his Socratic dialogues; thirty-six dialogues and thirteen letters have been ascribed to him. Plato's writings have been published in several fashions; this has led to several conventions regarding the naming and referencing of Plato's texts. Plato's dialogues have been used to teach a range of subjects, including philosophy, logic, ethics, rhetoric, and mathematics.
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Plotinus
Plotinus (Greek: Πλωτῖνος) (ca. 204/5–270 CE) was a major philosopher of the ancient world. In his system of theory there are the three principles: the One, the Intellect, and the Soul. His teacher was Ammonius Saccas and he is of the Platonic tradition. Historians of the 19th century invented the term Neoplatonism[citation needed] and applied it to him and his philosophy which was influential in Late Antiquity. Much of the biographical information about Plotinus comes from Porphyry's preface to his edition of Plotinus' Enneads. His metaphysical writings have inspired centuries of Pagan, Christian, Jewish, Islamic and Gnostic metaphysicians and mystics.
Porphyry reported that Plotinus was 66 years old when he died in 270, the second year of the reign of the emperor Claudius II, thus giving us the year of his teacher's birth as around 205. Eunapius reported that Plotinus was born in the Deltaic Lycopolis; "Lyco-" from the Greek meaning "wolf" (Greek: λύκος, lykos). It is the same root that gave rise to Aristotle's Lyceum (place of the wolf) in Egypt, which has led to speculations that he may have been a native Egyptian of Roman,Greek, or Hellenized Egyptian descent.
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Pythagoras
Pythagoras of Samos (Ancient Greek: Πυθαγόρας ὁ Σάμιος [Πυθαγόρης in Ionian Greek] Pythagóras ho Sámios "Pythagoras the Samian", or simply Πυθαγόρας; b. about 570 – d. about 495 BC) was an Ionian Greek philosopher, mathematician, and founder of the religious movement called Pythagoreanism. Most of the information about Pythagoras was written down centuries after he lived, so very little reliable information is known about him. He was born on the island of Samos, and might have travelled widely in his youth, visiting Egypt and other places seeking knowledge. Around 530 BC, he moved to Croton, a Greek colony in southern Italy, and there set up a religious sect. His followers pursued the religious rites and practices developed by Pythagoras, and studied his philosophical theories. The society took an active role in the politics of Croton, but this eventually led to their downfall. The Pythagorean meeting-places were burned, and Pythagoras was forced to flee the city. He is said to have ended his days in Metapontum.
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Rabindranath Tagore
Rabindranath Tagore (Bengali: রবীন্দ্রনাথ ঠাকুর; 7 May 1861 – 7 August 1941), sobriquet Gurudev, was a Bengali polymath who reshaped his region's literature and music. Author of Gitanjali and its "profoundly sensitive, fresh and beautiful verse", he became the first non-European to win the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1913. In translation his poetry was viewed as spiritual and mercurial; his seemingly mesmeric personality, flowing hair, and other-worldly dress earned him a prophet-like reputation in the West. His "elegant prose and magical poetry" remain largely unknown outside Bengal. Tagore introduced new prose and verse forms and the use of colloquial language into Bengali literature, thereby freeing it from traditional models based on classical Sanskrit. He was highly influential in introducing the best of Indian culture to the West and vice versa, and he is generally regarded as the outstanding creative artist of modern India.
A Pirali Brahmin from Calcutta, Tagore wrote poetry as an eight-year-old. At age sixteen, he released his first substantial poems under the pseudonym Bhānusiṃha ("Sun Lion"), which were seized upon by literary authorities as long-lost classics. He graduated to his first short stories and dramas—and the aegis of his birth name—by 1877. As a humanist, universalist internationalist, and strident anti-nationalist he denounced the Raj and advocated independence from Britain. As an exponent of the Bengal Renaissance, he advanced a vast canon that comprised paintings, sketches and doodles, hundreds of texts, and some two thousand songs; his legacy endures also in the institution he founded, Visva-Bharati University.
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Ralph Waldo Emerson
Ralph Waldo Emerson (May 25, 1803 – April 27, 1882) was an American essayist, lecturer, and poet, who led the Transcendentalist movement of the mid-19th century. He was seen as a champion of individualism and a prescient critic of the countervailing pressures of society, and he disseminated his thoughts through dozens of published essays and more than 1,500 public lectures across the United States.
Emerson gradually moved away from the religious and social beliefs of his contemporaries, formulating and expressing the philosophy of Transcendentalism in his 1836 essay, Nature. Following this ground-breaking work, he gave a speech entitled The American Scholar in 1837, which Oliver Wendell Holmes, Sr. considered to be America's "Intellectual Declaration of Independence".
Emerson wrote most of his important essays as lectures first, then revised them for print. His first two collections of essays – Essays: First Series and Essays: Second Series, published respectively in 1841 and 1844 – represent the core of his thinking, and include such well-known essays as Self-Reliance, The Over-Soul, Circles, The Poet and Experience. Together with Nature, these essays made the decade from the mid-1830s to the mid-1840s Emerson's most fertile period.
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Reinhold Niebuhr
Karl Paul Reinhold Niebuhr (/ˈraɪnhoʊld ˈniːbʊər/; June 21st, 1892 – June 1st, 1971) was an American theologian and commentator on public affairs. Starting as a leftist minister in the 1920s indebted to theological liberalism, he shifted to the new Neo-Orthodox theology in the 1930s, explaining how the sin of pride created evil in the world. He attacked utopianism as ineffectual for dealing with reality, writing in The Children of Light and the Children of Darkness (1944):
His realism deepened after 1945 and led him to support United States' efforts to confront Soviet communism around the world. A powerful speaker, he was one of the most influential religious leaders of the 1940s and 1950s in American public affairs.[citation needed] Niebuhr battled with the religious liberals over what he called their naïve views of sin and the optimism of the Social Gospel, and battled with the religious conservatives over what he viewed as their naïve view of Scripture and their narrow definition of "true religion".
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René Descartes
René Descartes (French pronunciation: [ʁəne dekaʁt]; Latinized form: Renatus Cartesius; adjectival form: "Cartesian"; 31 March 1596 – 11 February 1650) was a French philosopher, mathematician, 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 in a two-dimensional 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 and has been described as an example of genius.
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René Guénon
René Guénon (November 15, 1886 – January 7, 1951), also known as Shaykh `Abd al-Wahid Yahya, was a French author and intellectual who remains an influential figure in the domain of metaphysics, having written on topics ranging from metaphysics, "sacred science" and traditional studies to symbolism and initiation.
In his writings, he proposes either "to expose directly some aspects of Eastern metaphysical doctrines", these doctrines being defined by him as of "universal character", or "to adapt these same doctrines for Western readers while keeping strictly faithful to their spirit"; he only endorsed the act of "handing down" these Eastern doctrines, while reiterating their "non-personal character".
He wrote and published in French and his works have been translated into more than twenty languages.
René Guénon was born in Blois, a city in central France approximately 100 miles (~ 160 km) from Paris. Guénon, like most Frenchmen of the time, was born into a Roman Catholic family. Little is known of his family, although it appears that his father was an architect. By 1904, Guénon was living as a student in Paris, where his studies focused on mathematics and philosophy. He was known as a brilliant student, notably in mathematics, in spite of his poor health.
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Richard Posner
Richard Allen Posner (born January 11, 1939) is an American jurist, legal theorist, and economist who is currently a judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Seventh Circuit in Chicago and a Senior Lecturer at the University of Chicago Law School. He is an influential figure in the law and economics school of thought.
He is the author of nearly 40 books on jurisprudence, economics, and several other topics, including Economic Analysis of Law, The Economics of Justice, The Problems of Jurisprudence, Sex and Reason, Law, Pragmatism and Democracy, and The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Posner as the most cited legal scholar of the 20th century.
Born in New York City, Posner graduated from Yale College (A.B., 1959, summa cum laude), majoring in English, and from Harvard Law School (LL.B., 1962, magna cum laude), where he was first in his class and president of the Harvard Law Review. After clerking for Justice William J. Brennan of the United States Supreme Court during the 1962-63 term, he served as Attorney-Advisor to Federal Trade Commissioner Philip Elman; he would later argue that the Federal Trade Commission ought to be abolished. He went on to work in the Office of the Solicitor General in the U.S. Department of Justice, under Solicitor General Thurgood Marshall.
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Richard Swinburne
Richard G. Swinburne (born 26 December 1934) is a British philosopher of religion. He is an Emeritus Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oxford. Over the last 50 years Swinburne has been a very influential proponent of philosophical arguments for the existence of God. His philosophical contributions are primarily in philosophy of religion and philosophy of science. He aroused much discussion with his early work in the philosophy of religion, a trilogy of books consisting of The Coherence of Theism, The Existence of God, and Faith and Reason.
Swinburne received an Open Scholarship to study Classics at Exeter College, Oxford, but in fact graduated with a first class BA in Politics, Philosophy and Economics. Swinburne has held various professorships through his career in academia. From 1972 to 1985 he taught at Keele University. During part of this time, he gave the Gifford lectures at Aberdeen from 1982 to 1984, resulting in the book The Evolution of the Soul. From 1985 until his retirement in 2002 he was Nolloth Professor of the Philosophy of the Christian Religion at the University of Oxford (his successor in this chair is Brian Leftow).
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Richard Wollheim
Richard Arthur Wollheim (5 May 1923 – 4 November 2003) was a British philosopher noted for original work on mind and emotions, especially as related to the visual arts, specifically, painting. Wollheim served as the president of the British Society of Aesthetics from 1992 onwards until his death in 2003.
Son of an actress and a theatre impresario, Wollheim attended Westminster School, London, and Balliol College, Oxford (1941-2, 1945-8), interrupted by active military service in World War II. In 1949 he obtained a first in Philosophy, Politics and Economics, and began teaching at University College London, where he became Grote Professor of Mind and Logic and Department Head from 1963 to 1982. He was visiting professor at Harvard University, Columbia University, the University of Minnesota, Graduate Center, CUNY, the University of California-Berkeley, UC Davis and elsewhere. He chaired the Department at UC Berkeley, 1998-2002. On retirement from Berkeley, he served briefly as a guest lecturer at Balliol College. Wollheim gave several distinguished lecture series, most notably the Andrew M. Mellon lectures in Fine Arts, National Gallery of Art, Washington, D.C. (1984), published as Painting as an Art.
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Robert Alexy
Robert Alexy (born September 9, 1945 in Oldenburg, Germany) is a jurist and a legal philosopher.
Alexy studied law and philosophy at the University of Göttingen. He received his PhD in 1976 with the dissertation A Theory of Legal Argumentation, and he achieved his Habilitation in 1984 with a Theory of Constitutional Rights).
He is a professor at the University of Kiel and in 2002 he was appointed to the Academy of Sciences and Humanities at the University of Göttingen. In 2010 he was awarded the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany.
Alexy's definition of law looks like a mix of Kelsen's normativism (which was an influential version of legal positivism) and Radbruch's legal naturalism (Alexy, 2002), but Alexy's theory of argumentation (Alexy, 1983) puts him very close to legal interpretivism.
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Robert Audi
Robert Audi (born November 1941) is an American philosopher whose major work has focused on epistemology, ethics – especially on ethical intuitionism – and the theory of action. He is O'Brien Professor of Philosophy at the University of Notre Dame, and previously held a Chair in the Business School there. His 2005 book, The Good in the Right, updates and strengthens Rossian intuitionism and develops the epistemology of ethics. He has also written important works of political philosophy, particularly on the relationship between church and state.
Audi earned his BA from Colgate University and his MA and PhD from the University of Michigan. He taught briefly at the University of Texas at Austin, and for many years as the Charles J. Mach University Professor of Philosophy at the University of Nebraska, Lincoln before moving to University of Notre Dame as Professor of Philosophy, Professor of Management, and the David E. Gallo Chair in Ethics. He has served as General Editor of the First Edition (1995) and Second Edition (1999) of The Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy. He has also served as the general editor for "Modern Readings in Epistemology", as well as for "Modern readings in Metaphysics".
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Robert Bork
Robert Heron Bork (born March 1, 1927) is an American legal scholar who has advocated the judicial philosophy of originalism. Bork formerly served as a Yale Law School professor, Solicitor General, Acting Attorney General, and judge for the United States Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit. In 1987, he was nominated to the Supreme Court by President Ronald Reagan, but the Senate rejected his nomination. Bork had more success as an antitrust scholar, where his once-idiosyncratic view that antitrust law should focus on maximizing consumer welfare has come to dominate American legal thinking on the subject. Currently, Bork is a lawyer, law professor, and bestselling author.
Bork was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. His father was Harry Philip Bork (1897–1974), a steel company purchasing agent, and his mother was Elisabeth (née Kunkle; 1898–2004), a schoolteacher. He was married to Claire Davidson from 1952 until 1980, when she died of cancer. They had a daughter, Ellen, and two sons, Robert and Charles. In 1982 he married Mary Ellen Pohl, a Roman Catholic religious sister turned activist.
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Robert Boyle
Robert Boyle, FRS, (25 January 1627 – 31 December 1691) was a 17th-century natural philosopher, chemist, physicist, and inventor, also noted for his writings in theology. He has been variously described as Irish, English and Anglo-Irish, his father having come to Ireland from England during the time of the Plantations.
Although his research clearly has its roots in the alchemical tradition, Boyle is largely regarded today as the first modern chemist, and therefore one of the founders of modern chemistry, and one of the pioneers of modern experimental scientific method. He is best known for Boyle's law, which describes the inversely proportional relationship between the absolute pressure and volume of a gas, if the temperature is kept constant within a closed system. Among his works, The Sceptical Chymist is seen as a cornerstone book in the field of chemistry.
Boyle was born in Lismore Castle, in County Waterford, Ireland, the seventh son and fourteenth child of Richard Boyle, 1st Earl of Cork and Catherine Fenton. Richard Boyle arrived in Dublin from England in 1588 during the Tudor plantations of Ireland and obtained an appointment as a deputy escheator. He had amassed enormous landholdings by the time Robert was born. Catherine Fenton was the daughter of English writer Geoffrey Fenton, who was born in Dublin in 1539, and Alice Weston, the daughter of Robert Weston, who was born in Lismore in 1541.
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Robert Kilwardby
Robert Kilwardby (c. 1215–11 September 1279) was an Archbishop of Canterbury in England and as well as a cardinal.
Kilwardby studied at the University of Paris, then was a teacher of grammar and logic there. He then joined the Dominican Order and studied theology, and became regent at Oxford University before 1261, probably by 1245. He was named provincial prior of the Dominicans for England in 1261, and in October 1272 Pope Gregory X appointed him as Archbishop of Canterbury to end a disupte over the election. Kilwardby was provided to the archbishopric on 11 October 1272, given the temporalities on 12 December 1272, and consecrated on 26 February 1273.
Kilwardby crowned Edward I and his wife Eleanor as king and queen of England in August 1274, but otherwise took little part in politics. He instead concentrated on his ecclesiastical duties, including charity to the poor and donating to the Dominicans.
In 1278 Pope Nicholas III named Kilwardby Cardinal Bishop of Porto and Santa Rufina. He then resigned Canterbury and left England, taking with him papers, registers and documents belonging to the see. He also left the see deep in debt again, after his predecessor had cleared the debt. He died in Italy in 1279 and was buried in the Dominican convent in Viterbo, Italy. While in theory this was a promotion, probably it was not, as the pope was unhappy with Kilwardy's support of efforts to resist the payment of papal revenues and with the lack of effort towards the reforms demanded at the Second Council of Lyon in 1274.
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Robert Nozick
Robert Nozick (November 16, 1938 – January 23, 2002) was an American political philosopher, most prominent in the 1970s and 1980s. He was a professor at Harvard University. He is best known for his book Anarchy, State, and Utopia (1974), a libertarian answer to John Rawls's A Theory of Justice (1971). His other work involved decision theory and epistemology.
Nozick was born in Brooklyn, the son of a Jewish entrepreneur from the Russian shtetl who had been born with the name of Cohen. Nozick was married to the poet Gjertrud Schnackenberg. He died in 2002 after a prolonged struggle with stomach cancer. He is interred at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Cambridge, Massachusetts.
Nozick was educated at Columbia (A.B. 1959, summa cum laude), where he studied with Sidney Morgenbesser, and later at Princeton (Ph.D. 1963), and Oxford as a Fulbright Scholar (1963-1964).
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Roger Bacon
Roger Bacon, O.F.M. (c. 1214–1294), (scholastic accolade Doctor Mirabilis, meaning "wonderful teacher"), was an English philosopher and Franciscan friar who placed considerable emphasis on the study of nature through empirical methods. He is sometimes credited, mainly starting in the 19th century, as one of the earliest European advocates of the modern scientific method inspired by the works of Aristotle and later pseudo-Aristotelian works, like the works of Muslim scientist Alhazen. However, more recent reevaluations emphasize that he was essentially a medieval thinker, with much of his "experimental" knowledge obtained from books, in the scholastic tradition. A survey of the reception of Bacon's work over centuries found that it often reflects the concerns and controversies central to the receivers.
Roger Bacon was born in Ilchester in Somerset, England, possibly in 1213 or 1214 at the Ilchester Friary. The only source for his date of birth is his statement in the Opus Tertium, written in 1267, that "forty years have passed since I first learned the alphabet". The 1214 birth date assumes he was not being literal, and may have meant 40 years had passed since he matriculated at Oxford at the age of 13. If he had been literal, his birth date was more likely to have been around 1220/1222. In the same passage he reports that for all but two of those forty years he had always been engaged in study. His family appears to have been well-off, but, during the stormy reign of Henry III of England, their property was despoiled and several members of the family were driven into exile.
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Roger Fry
Roger Eliot Fry (14 December 1866 – 9 September 1934) was an English artist and art critic, and a member of the Bloomsbury Group. Establishing his reputation as a scholar of the Old Masters, he became an advocate of more recent developments in French painting, to which he gave the name Post-Impressionism. He was the first figure to raise public awareness of modern art in Britain, and emphasized the formal properties of paintings over the "associated ideas" conjured in the viewer by their depicted content. He was described by the art historian Kenneth Clark as "incomparably the greatest influence on taste since Ruskin... In so far as taste can be changed by one man, it was changed by Roger Fry".
Born in London, the son of the judge Edward Fry, he grew up in a wealthy Quaker family in Highgate. Before going up to Cambridge, Fry was educated at Clifton College. Fry studied at King's College, Cambridge, where he was a member of the Cambridge Apostles. After taking a first in the Natural Science tripos, he went to Paris and then Italy to study art. Eventually he specialised in landscape painting.
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Roger Scruton
Roger Vernon Scruton (born 27 February 1944) is a conservative English philosopher and writer. He is the author of over 30 books, including Art and Imagination (1974), Sexual Desire (1986), The Aesthetics of Music (1997), and A Political Philosophy: Arguments for Conservatism (2006). He has also written several novels and two operas.
Scruton was a lecturer and professor of aesthetics at Birkbeck College, London, from 1971 to 1992. In 1982 he helped found The Salisbury Review, a conservative political journal, which he edited for 18 years. Since 1992 he has held part-time positions at Boston University, the American Enterprise Institute in Washington, D.C., the University of St Andrews, and the Institute for the Psychological Sciences in Arlington, Virginia—a school affiliated with the Legion of Christ, a conservative Catholic religious congregation. He also founded the Claridge Press in 1987, and sits on the editorial board of the British Journal of Aesthetics. He serves in addition as a member of the International Advisory Board of the Center for European Renewal.
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Romanian philosophy
Romanian philosophy is a name covering either a) the philosophy done in Romania or by Romanians, or b) an ethnic philosophy, which expresses at a high level the fundamental features of the Romanian spirituality, or which elevates to a philosophical level the Weltanschauung of the Romanian people, as deposited in language and folklore, traditions, architecture and other linguistic and cultural artifacts.
The discussion concerning the existence of a Romanian philosophy has known three stages.
Between the two World Wars, after the emergence of Greater Romania, Romanian national identity went through a crisis. Since it was not centered anymore on immediate political goals (national rights, independence, national unity etc.), the idea now had a more pronounced cultural character. Therefore, discussions of "national specificity" in historiography, literature and philosophy became very common. The first history of Romanian philosophy was published in 1922 by Marin Ştefănescu, proving that philosophical thinking in Romania had reached the level of self-reflexivity; in other words, it had become conscious of itself. The general conclusion of interbellum discussions, which involved almost every notable philosopher, was that there is a Romanian philosophy proper, with a distinct profile among other national philosophies. Constantin Noica, who became one of the most prominent Romanian philosophers, thought early on that Romanian philosophy is characterized by paganism, cosmicism (i.e. no acute separation of the world of the man from, transcendence) and determinism (or rather, "fatalism").
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Ronald Dworkin
Ronald Myles Dworkin, FBA (born December 11, 1931) is an American philosopher and scholar of constitutional law. He is Frank Henry Sommer Professor of Law and Philosophy at New York University and Emeritus Professor of Jurisprudence at University College London, and has taught previously at Yale Law School and the University of Oxford. An influential contributor to both philosophy of law and political philosophy, Dworkin received the 2007 Holberg International Memorial Prize in the Humanities for "his pioneering scholarly work" of "worldwide impact." According to a survey in The Journal of Legal Studies, Dworkin was the second most-cited American legal scholar of the twentieth century.
His theory of law as integrity, in which judges interpret the law in terms of consistent and communal moral principles, especially justice and fairness, is amongst the most influential contemporary theories about the nature of law. He advocates a "moral reading" of the United States Constitution, and an interpretivist approach to law and morality. He is a frequent commentator on contemporary political and legal issues, particularly those concerning the Supreme Court of the United States, often in the pages of The New York Review of Books.
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Ronald Englefield
Frederick Ronald Hastings Englefield (1891–1975) was an English poet and philosopher. His major work, Language and Thought, remains unpublished, though excerpts have appeared in various books and journals. He was critical of the use of words in situations where the words have no clear referent, especially in religion and philosophy, but also in literary criticism. His theory that language evolved naturally from gestures has not met with wide acceptance, but his criticism of religion and philosophy, published posthumously, was well received and is still in print.
The child of a London solicitor, Englefield attended Mill Hill School in North London. He was a scholarship student at St. John's College, Cambridge, where he studied modern languages. In World War I, he served in France and in Salonika, and was mentioned by Winston Churchill for "gallant and distinguished services in the field". After the war, he supported himself by teaching French and German in public schools, and wrote poetry and philosophy. In his lifetime, his only publications were a book of poems, Songs of Defiance and, in the last years of his life, two articles, excerpts from the rejected Language and Thought, in the journal Trivium, University of Wales Press.
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Roscoe Pound
Nathan Roscoe Pound (October 27, 1870 – June 30, 1964) was a distinguished American legal scholar and educator. He was Dean of Harvard Law School from 1916 to 1936. The Journal of Legal Studies has identified Pound as one of the most cited legal scholars of the 20th century.
Pound was born in Lincoln, Nebraska, USA to Stephen Bosworth Pound and Laura Pound.
Pound studied botany at the University of Nebraska (BA, 1888, & MA, 1889) in Lincoln, Nebraska where he became a member of Acacia Fraternity. In 1889, he began the study of law; he spent one year at Harvard but never received a law degree. He received the first Ph.D., in botany, from the University of Nebraska in 1898.
The University of Nebraska fielded its first football team the year after Pound graduated. Pound traveled with the teams to their games, including their first one. He also covered the team in the student newspaper and even refereed some matches. Pound created many chants and songs for the team and helped create a fan base that traveled well, which is something that the Cornhuskers still see to this day.
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Rudolf Carnap
Rudolf Carnap (May 18, 1891 – September 14, 1970) was an influential German-born philosopher who was active in Europe before 1935 and in the United States thereafter. He was a major member of the Vienna Circle and an advocate of logical positivism.
Carnap was born to a west German family that had been humble until his parents' generation. He began his formal education at the Barmen Gymnasium. From 1910 to 1914, he attended the University of Jena, intending to write a thesis in physics. But he also studied carefully Kant's Critique of Pure Reason during a course taught by Bruno Bauch, and was one of very few students to attend Gottlob Frege's courses in mathematical logic. After serving in the German army during World War I for three years, he was given permission to study physics at the University of Berlin, 1917–18, where Albert Einstein was a newly appointed professor. Carnap then attended the University of Jena, where he wrote a thesis defining an axiomatic theory of space and time. The physics department said it was too philosophical, and Bruno Bauch of the philosophy department said it was pure physics. Carnap then wrote another thesis, with Bauch's supervision, on the theory of space in a more orthodox Kantian style, and published as Der Raum (Space) in a supplemental issue of Kant-Studien (1922). In it he makes the clear distinction between formal, physical and perceptual (e.g., visual) spaces.
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Rudolf Makkreel
Rudolf A. Makkreel is Charles Howard Candler Professor of Philosophy at Emory University.
Makkreel was born in 1939 in Antwerp, Belgium, grew up in the Netherlands, and received his Ph.D. from Columbia University. He also taught at the University of California, San Diego and was the Editor of the Journal of the History of Philosophy from 1983 till 1998.
His work has focused on the German philosophers Dilthey and Kant. Makkreel is most well known for emphasizing the roles of the imagination, judgment and interpretation within Kant's critical system. The implications of Kant's conception of reflective judgment for hermeneutics and for the theory of the human sciences are also central to Makkreel's writings. In particular he has argued for the relevance of Kant's determinant-reflective judgment distinction for Dilthey's explanation-understanding distinction. Some other themes that pervade Makkreel's writings include the difference between orientational and foundational principles as well as the relation between reflexive awareness and reflective consciousness.
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Rudolf Otto
Rudolf Otto (September 25, 1869–6 March 1937) was an eminent German Lutheran theologian and scholar of comparative religion.
Born in Peine near Hanover, Otto attended the Gymnasium Andreanum in Hildesheim and studied at the universities of Erlangen and Göttingen, where he wrote his dissertation on Martin Luther's understanding of the Holy Spirit, and his habilitation on Kant. By 1906, he held a position as extraordinary professor, and in 1910 he received an honorary doctorate from the University of Giessen. In 1915, he became ordinary professor at the University of Breslau, and in 1917, at the University of Marburg's Divinity School, then one of the most famous Protestant seminaries in the world. Although he received several other calls, he remained in Marburg for the rest of his life. He retired in 1929 and died of pneumonia eight years later, after he had suffered serious injuries falling some 20 m from a tower. His death is held to be the result of a suicide attempt., but many have long believed that he was thrown from the tower by Nazi agents, as the Nazi Party was hostile to his views, especially the radical equality implied in those views (and there is some suspicion that Eliade's Encylopedia entry reflects Eliade's well-known Nazi sympathies more than the truth). He is buried in Marburg cemetery.
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Russell Kirk
Russell Kirk (October 19, 1918 – April 29, 1994) was an American political theorist, moralist, historian, social critic, literary critic, and fiction author known for his influence on 20th century American conservatism. His 1953 book, The Conservative Mind, gave shape to the amorphous post–World War II conservative movement. It traced the development of conservative thought in the Anglo-American tradition, giving special importance to the ideas of Edmund Burke. Kirk was also considered the chief proponent of traditionalist conservatism.
Russell Kirk was born in Plymouth, Michigan. He was the son of Russell Andrew Kirk, a railroad engineer, and Marjorie Pierce Kirk. Kirk obtained his B.A. at Michigan State University and a M.A. at Duke University. During World War II, he served in the American armed forces and corresponded with libertarian writer, Isabel Paterson, who helped to shape his early political thought. After the war, he attended the University of St. Andrews in Scotland. In 1953, he became the only American to be awarded the degree of Doctor of Letters by that university.
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Samuel Johnson
Samuel Johnson (18 September 1709 [O.S. 7 September] – 13 December 1784), often referred to as Dr Johnson, was an English author who made lasting contributions to English literature as a poet, essayist, moralist, literary critic, biographer, editor and lexicographer. Johnson was a devout Anglican and committed Tory, and has been described as "arguably the most distinguished man of letters in English history". He is also the subject of "the most famous single work of biographical art in the whole of literature": James Boswell's Life of Samuel Johnson.
Johnson was born in Lichfield, Staffordshire, and attended Pembroke College, Oxford for just over a year, before his lack of funds forced him to leave. After working as a teacher he moved to London, where he began to write miscellaneous pieces for The Gentleman's Magazine. His early works include the biography The Life of Richard Savage, the poems "London" and "The Vanity of Human Wishes", and the play Irene.
After nine years of work, Johnson's A Dictionary of the English Language was published in 1755; it had a far-reaching effect on Modern English and has been described as "one of the greatest single achievements of scholarship." This work brought Johnson popularity and success. Until the completion of the Oxford English Dictionary 150 years later, Johnson's was viewed as the pre-eminent British dictionary. His later works included essays, an influential annotated edition of William Shakespeare's plays, and the widely read tale Rasselas. In 1763, he befriended James Boswell, with whom he later travelled to Scotland; Johnson described their travels in A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland. Towards the end of his life, he produced the massive and influential Lives of the Most Eminent English Poets, a collection of biographies and evaluations of 17th- and 18th-century poets.
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Saul Kripke
Saul Aaron Kripke (born November 13, 1940) is an American philosopher and logician. He is a professor emeritus at Princeton and teaches as a Distinguished Professor of Philosophy at the CUNY Graduate Center. Since the 1960s Kripke has been a central figure in a number of fields related to mathematical logic, philosophy of language, philosophy of mathematics, metaphysics, epistemology, and set theory. Much of his work remains unpublished or exists only as tape-recordings and privately circulated manuscripts. Kripke was the recipient of the 2001 Schock Prize in Logic and Philosophy. A recent poll conducted among philosophers ranked Kripke among the top ten most important philosophers of the past 200 years.
Kripke has made influential and original contributions to logic, especially modal logic, since he was a teenager. Unusual for a professional philosopher, his only degree is an undergraduate degree from Harvard, in mathematics. His work has profoundly influenced analytic philosophy, with his principal contribution being a semantics for modal logic, involving possible worlds as described in a system now called Kripke semantics. Another of his most important contributions is his argument that necessity is a 'metaphysical' notion, which should be separated from the epistemic notion of a priori, and that there are necessary a posteriori truths, such as "Water is H2O." He has also contributed an original reading of Wittgenstein, referred to as "Kripkenstein." His most famous work is Naming and Necessity (1980).
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Sergei Bulgakov
Fr. Sergei Nikolaevich Bulgakov (Russian: Серге́й Никола́евич Булга́ков) (28 June [O.S. 16 June] 1871 - July 12, 1944) was a Russian Orthodox Christian theologian, philosopher and economist. Until 1922 he worked in Russia; afterwards in Paris.
Sergei Nicolaevich Bulgakov was born on 16 June 1871 Old Style to the family of an Orthodox priest (Nikolai Bulgakov) in the town of Livny, Oryol guberniya, in Russia.
He studied at Orel seminary, then at Yelets gimnasium. In 1894 he graduated from the Law School of Moscow University, where he had also undertaken a serious study of political economy.
During his study at the seminary Bulgakov became interested in Marxism and took part in the Legal Marxism movement. Studying Marxism, Bulgakov eventually became convinced of the impotence of this theory. Under the influence of works of Russian religious thinkers (Leo Tolstoy, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Vladimir Solovyov, etc.), in the course of his meetings and arguments with Leo Tolstoy he found his religious beliefs again. He wrote a book about his evolution (Sergey Bulgakov, From Marxism to Idealism, 1903). Such an evolution was common for the Russian intelligentsia of the time, and he soon became one of their recognised ideologists. A primary contributor to the books Problems of Idealism (1902), Vekhi, Problems of Religion, About Vladimir Solovyev, About the Religion of Leo Tolstoy, The Religion of Solovyov's Philosophical Society, he participated in the journals New Way (Новый Путь) and Questions of Life (Вопросы Жизни). He was a leader of the publisher Way (Путь, 1911–1917), where he printed many important works of contemporary Orthodox theology.
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Sextus Empiricus
Sextus Empiricus (c. 160-210 AD), was a physician and philosopher, and has been variously reported to have lived in Alexandria, Rome, or Athens. His philosophical work is the most complete surviving account of ancient Greek and Roman skepticism.
In his medical work, tradition maintains that he belonged to the "empiric school", as reflected by his name. However, at least twice in his writings, Sextus seems to place himself closer to the "methodic school", as his philosophical views imply.
Sextus Empiricus's three known works are the Outlines of Pyrrhonism (Πυῤῥώνειοι ὑποτύπωσεις or Pyrrhōneioi hypotypōseis, thus commonly abbreviated PH), and two distinct works preserved under the same title, Against the Mathematicians (Adversus Mathematicos), one of which is probably incomplete.
The first six books of Against the Mathematicians are commonly known as Against the Professors, but each book also has a traditional title (Against the Grammarians (book I), Against the Rhetoricians (book II), Against the Geometricians (book III), Against the Arithmeticians (book IV), Against the Astrologers (book V), Against the Musicians (book VI). It is widely believed, with perhaps the exception of Sextus scholar Richard Bett, that this is Sextus's latest and most mature work.
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Shang Yang
Shang Yang (Chinese: 商鞅; pinyin: Shāng Yāng; Wade–Giles: Shang Yang, 390–338 BC) was an important statesman of the State of Qin during the Warring States Period of Chinese history. Born Wei Yang (simplified Chinese: 卫鞅; traditional Chinese: 衛鞅) in the State of Wey, with the support of Duke Xiao of Qin Yang enacted numerous reforms in Qin. These were in accordance with his legalist philosophy as recorded in The Book of Lord Shang and assisted Qin in its change from a peripheral state to that of a militarily powerful and strongly centralized kingdom. He changed the administration of the state through an emphasis on meritocracy and devolvement of power from the nobility.
The vast majority of Yang's reforms were taken from policies instituted elsewhere, such as from Wu Qi of the State of Chu;[citation needed] however, Yang's reforms were more thorough and extreme than those of other states. Under Yang's tenure, Qin quickly caught up with and surpassed the reforms of other states.
After Duke Xiao of Qin, ascended the Qin throne, Yang left his lowly position in the State of Wey (to whose ruling family he had been born, but had yet to obtain a high position in) to become the chief adviser in Qin at Duke Xiao's behest. There his changes to the state's legal system (which were said to have built upon Li Kui's Canon of Laws) propelled the Qin to prosperity. His policies built the foundation that enabled Qin to conquer all of China, uniting the country for the first time and ushering in the Qin dynasty.
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Slavoj Žižek
Slavoj Žižek (pronounced [ˈslavoj ˈʒiʒɛk]; born 21 March 1949) is a Slovenian philosopher and cultural critic working in the traditions of Hegelianism, Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis. He has made contributions to political theory, film theory and theoretical psychoanalysis.
Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute of Sociology University of Ljubljana, Slovenia, and a professor at the European Graduate School. He has been a visiting professor at, among others, the University of Chicago, Columbia University, London Consortium, Princeton University, New York University, The New School, the University of Minnesota, the University of California, Irvine and the University of Michigan. He is currently the International Director of the Birkbeck Institute for the Humanities at Birkbeck, University of London and president of the Society for Theoretical Psychoanalysis, Ljubljana.
Žižek uses examples from popular culture to explain the theory of Jacques Lacan and uses Lacanian psychoanalysis, Hegelian philosophy and Marxist economic criticism to interpret and speak extensively on immediately current social phenomena, including the current ongoing global financial crisis. In a 2008 interview with Amy Goodman on the New York City radio show Democracy Now! he described himself as a "communist in a qualified sense" and in another appearance on the show in October 2009 he described himself as a "radical leftist".
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Society
A society, or a human society, is a group of people related to each other through persistent relations, or a large social grouping sharing the same geographical or virtual territory, subject to the same political authority and dominant cultural expectations. Human societies are characterized by patterns of relationships (social relations) between individuals who share a distinctive culture and institutions; a given society may be described as the sum total of such relationships among its constituent members. In the social sciences, a larger society often evinces stratification and/or dominance patterns in subgroups.
Insofar as it is collaborative, a society can enable its members to benefit in ways that would not otherwise be possible on an individual basis; both individual and social (common) benefits can thus be distinguished, or in many cases found to overlap.
A society can also consist of like-minded people governed by their own norms and values within a dominant, larger society. This is sometimes referred to as a subculture, a term used extensively within criminology.
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Sri Aurobindo
Sri Aurobindo (Bengali: শ্রী অরবিন্দ Sri Ôrobindo) (15 August 1872 – 5 December 1950), born Aurobindo Ghosh or Ghose (Bengali: অরবিন্দ ঘোষ Ôrobindo Ghosh), was an Indian nationalist, freedom fighter, philosopher, yogi, guru, and poet. He joined the Indian movement for freedom from British rule and for a duration became one of its most important leaders, before developing his own vision of human progress and spiritual evolution.
The central theme of Aurobindo's vision was the evolution of human life into life divine. He wrote: "Man is a transitional being. He is not final. The step from man to superman is the next approaching achievement in the earth evolution. It is inevitable because it is at once the intention of the inner spirit and the logic of nature's process."
Aurobindo's writings synthesized Eastern and Western philosophy, religion, literature, and psychology. Aurobindo was the first Indian to create a major literary corpus in English.His works include philosophy; poetry; translations of and commentaries on the Vedas, Upanishads, and the Gita; plays; literary, social, political, and historical criticism; devotional works; spiritual journals and three volumes of letters. His principal philosophical writings are The Life Divine and The Synthesis of Yoga, while his principal poetic work is Savitri: A Legend and a Symbol.
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Stephan Körner
Stephan Körner, FBA (26 September 1913—17 August 2000) was a British philosopher, who specialised in the work of Kant, the study of concepts, and in the philosophy of mathematics. Born to a Jewish family in Czechoslovakia, he left the country to avoid certain death at the hands of the Nazis after the German occupation in 1939, and came to the United Kingdom as a refugee, where he began his study of philosophy; by 1952 he was a professor of philosophy at the University of Bristol, taking up a second professorship at Yale in 1970. He was married to Edith Körner, and was the father of the mathematician Thomas Körner and the biochemist, writer and translator (née) Ann M. Körner.
Körner was born in Ostrava, then part of Austria-Hungary, in 1913, the son of a teacher of classics and his wife. His father had studied classics in Vienna, while at the same time, winning prizes in mathematics to supplement his meager income (a fellow student was a certain Leo Trotsky, who was frequently asked, "When is that great revolution that you are always talking about going to happen?"). Despite an early wish to study philosophy, Stephan was dissuaded by his father, who feared that his son would become a penniless academic; he was persuaded to study something more practical, and took his degree in law at Charles University in Prague, completing it in 1935. (He practised law only briefly but retained a strong interest, attending seminars at Yale University Law School after his appointment as a visiting professor at Yale in the 1970s.) From 1936 to 1939 he carried out his military service, serving as an officer in the cavalry (see photograph).
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Stephen Pepper
Stephen C. Pepper (April 29, 1891–May 1, 1972) was an American philosopher. He is the author of World Hypotheses (1942).
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Stephen Toulmin
Stephen Edelston Toulmin (25 March 1922 - 4 December 2009) was a British philosopher, author, and educator. Influenced by Ludwig Wittgenstein, Toulmin devoted his works to the analysis of moral reasoning. Throughout his writings, he sought to develop practical arguments which can be used effectively in evaluating the ethics behind moral issues. His works were later found useful in the field of rhetoric for analyzing rhetorical arguments. The Toulmin Model of Argumentation, a diagram containing six interrelated components used for analyzing arguments, was considered his most influential work, particularly in the field of rhetoric and communication, and in computer science.
Stephen Toulmin was born in London, England, on 25 March 1922 to Geoffrey Edelson Toulmin and Doris Holman Toulmin. He earned his Bachelor of Arts degree from King's College, Cambridge in 1942. Soon after, Toulmin was hired by the Ministry of Aircraft Production as a junior scientific officer, first at the Malvern Radar Research and Development Station and later at the Supreme Headquarters of the Allied Expeditionary Force in Germany. At the end of World War II, he returned to England to earn a Master of Arts degree in 1947 and a PhD in philosophy from Cambridge University, subsequently publishing his dissertation as An Examination of the Place of Reason in Ethics (1950). While at Cambridge, Toulmin came into contact with the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, whose examination on the relationship between the uses and the meanings of language shaped much of Toulmin’s own work.
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Steven Pinker
Steven Arthur Pinker (born September 18, 1954, Montreal, Canada) is a Canadian-born experimental psychologist, cognitive scientist, linguist and popular science author. He is a Harvard College Professor and the Johnstone Family Professor in the Department of Psychology at Harvard University, and is known for his advocacy of evolutionary psychology and the computational theory of mind.
Pinker's academic specializations are visual cognition and psycholinguistics. His experimental subjects include mental imagery, shape recognition, visual attention, children's language development, regular and irregular phenomena in language, the neural bases of words and grammar, and the psychology of innuendo and euphemism. He published two technical books which proposed a general theory of language acquisition and applied it to children's learning of verbs. In his popular books, he has argued that language is an "instinct" or biological adaptation shaped by natural selection. He is the author of six books for a general audience: The Language Instinct (1994), How the Mind Works (1997), Words and Rules (2000), The Blank Slate (2002), The Stuff of Thought (2007), and The Better Angels of Our Nature (2011).
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Susanne Langer
Susanne Katherina Langer (née Knauth) (20 December 1895 – 17 July 1985) was an American philosopher of mind and of art who was influenced by Ernst Cassirer and Alfred North Whitehead. She was one of the first women to achieve an academic career in philosophy and the first to be popularly and professionally recognized as an American philosopher. Langer is best known for her 1942 book Philosophy in a New Key.
Langer was born in Manhattan, the daughter of German immigrants Antonio Knauth, a lawyer, and Else M. (Uhlich) Knauth. German was spoken exclusively at home and she never completely lost her accent. As a girl, Langer learned to play both the cello and piano and for her early education attended Veltin private school. She studied at Radcliffe College, receiving her bachelors degree in 1920, and her doctorate in 1926. Alfred North Whitehead was her dissertation adviser. She taught at Radcliffe, Wellesley College, Smith College, and Columbia University and was visiting lecturer at a number of other institutions. In 1941 she met Ernst Cassirer whose work The Philosophy of Symbolic Forms she had read in the 1920s and had greatly influenced her thinking. Recognizing their common ground, Cassirer remained in close contact with Langer until his death in 1945.
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Søren Kierkegaard
Søren Aabye Kierkegaard (/ˈsɔrən ˈkɪərkəɡɑrd/ or /ˈkɪərkəɡɔr/; Danish: [ˈsɶːɐn ˈkiɐ̯ɡəɡɒːˀ] ( listen)) (5 May 1813 – 11 November 1855) was a Danish philosopher, theologian and religious author. He was a critic of idealist intellectuals and philosophers of his time, such as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph Schelling and Karl Wilhelm Friedrich Schlegel. He was also critical of the state and practice of Christianity, primarily that of the Church of Denmark. He is widely considered to be the first existentialist philosopher.
Much of his philosophical work deals with the issues of how one lives as a "single individual", giving priority to concrete human reality over abstract thinking, and highlighting the importance of personal choice and commitment.
His theological work focuses on Christian ethics, on the institution of the Church, and on the differences between purely objective proofs of Christianity. He wrote of the individual's subjective relationship to Jesus Christ, the God-Man, which came through faith. Much of his work deals with the art of Christian love.
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Thales
Thales of Miletus ( /ˈθeɪliːz/; Greek: Θαλῆς, Thalēs; c. 624 BC – c. 546 BC) was a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher from Miletus in Asia Minor, and one of the Seven Sages of Greece. Many, most notably Aristotle, regard him as the first philosopher in the Greek tradition. According to Bertrand Russell, "Western philosophy begins with Thales." Thales attempted to explain natural phenomena without reference to mythology and was tremendously influential in this respect. Almost all of the other pre-Socratic philosophers follow him in attempting to provide an explanation of ultimate substance, change, and the existence of the world—without reference to mythology. Those philosophers were also influential, and eventually Thales' rejection of mythological explanations became an essential idea for the scientific revolution. He was also the first to define general principles and set forth hypotheses, and as a result has been dubbed the "Father of Science", though it is argued that Democritus is actually more deserving of this title.
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Theodor Lipps
Theodor Lipps (28 July 1851 in Wallhalben – 17 October 1914 in Munich) was a German philosopher. Lipps was one of the most influential German university professors of his time, attracting many students from other countries. Lipps was very concerned with conceptions of art and the aesthetic, focusing much of his philosophy around such issues. Among his fervent admirers was Sigmund Freud, Lipps then being the main supporter of the idea of the Unconscious. He thought that each state had its level of consciousness and that laughter was associated with hidden negative aspects. He adopted Robert Vischer's notions of empathy or esthetic sympathy (Einfühlung). Late in life, Lipps adopted some ideas from Husserl. Disliking his psychologism, some of his students joined with some of Husserl's to form a new branch of philosophy called Phenomenology of essences.
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Thierry de Duve
Thierry de Duve (born 1944) is a Belgian professor of modern art theory and contemporary art theory, and both actively teaches and publishes books in the field. He is an art critic and also curates exhibitions .
He has been a visiting professor at: the University of Lille III (France), the Sorbonne (France), MIT, and Johns Hopkins University, and was the Elliot and Roslyn Jaffe Distinguished Visiting Professor in Contemporary Art in Penn's History of Art Department.
He was a fellow at the Center for the Advanced Study of the Visual Arts (CASVA) at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, D.C.
In 2010 he teaches art history and esthetic in the University of Lille III.
For him there is no difference between modern, post-modern and contemporary art: the same logic rules from the beginning. Art has no essence; it is what we call by that name.
Books Published in English:
Books Published in original language:
Books Published in original language, together:
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Thomas Aquinas
Thomas Aquinas, O.P. ( /əˈkwaɪnəs/ ə-KWY-nəs; 1225 – 7 March 1274), also Thomas of Aquin or Aquino, was an Italian Dominican priest of the Roman Catholic Church, and an immensely influential philosopher and theologian in the tradition of scholasticism, known as Doctor Angelicus ([the] Angelic Doctor), Doctor Communis, or Doctor Universalis. "Aquinas" is not a surname, but is a Latin demonym for a resident of Aquino, his place of birth. He was the foremost classical proponent of natural theology, and the father of Thomism. His influence on Western thought is considerable, and much of modern philosophy was conceived as a reaction against, or as an agreement with, his ideas, particularly in the areas of ethics, natural law, metaphysics, and political theory.
Thomas is held in the Catholic Church to be the model teacher for those studying for the priesthood. The works for which he is best-known are the Summa Theologica and the Summa Contra Gentiles. As one of the 33 Doctors of the Church, he is considered the Church's greatest theologian and philosopher. Pope Benedict XV declared: "This (Dominican) Order ... acquired new luster when the Church declared the teaching of Thomas to be her own and that Doctor, honored with the special praises of the Pontiffs, the master and patron of Catholic schools."
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Thomas Chubb
Thomas Chubb (September 29, 1679 – February 8, 1747) was an English lay Deist writer, born near Salisbury.
Chubb regarded Christ as a divine teacher, but held reason to be sovereign in matters of religion, questioned religions' morality, yet was on rational grounds a defender of Christianity. He had no learning, but was well up in the religious controversies of the time.
Chubb wrote The True Gospel of Jesus Christ, Asserted wherein he stated that one must distinguish between the teaching of Jesus and that of the Apostles who wrote that the Gospels.
Chubb's views concerning free will and determinism, as expressed in his book A Collection of Tracts on Various Subjects (1730) was the subject of extensive criticism by Jonathan Edwards in his book Freedom of the Will (1754).
He published tracts, one of which, The Previous Question with regard to Religion, went through four editions, three in 1725. They were collected in a quarto volume in 1730, and attracted wider notice. (A second edition, in 2 volumes which appeared in 1754 included 35 tracts.) Chubb was encouraged to write further tracts. A disciple of Samuel Clarke, he gradually diverged from Arianism into a modified deism.
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Thomas Henry Huxley
Thomas Henry Huxley PC FRS (4 May 1825 – 29 June 1895) was an English biologist (anatomist), known as "Darwin's Bulldog" for his advocacy of Charles Darwin's theory of evolution.
Huxley's famous 1860 debate with Samuel Wilberforce was a key moment in the wider acceptance of evolution, and in his own career. Huxley had been planning to leave Oxford on the previous day, but, after an encounter with Robert Chambers, the author of Vestiges, he changed his mind and decided to join the debate. Wilberforce was coached by Richard Owen, against whom Huxley also debated whether humans were closely related to apes.
Huxley was slow to accept some of Darwin's ideas, such as gradualism, and was undecided about natural selection, but despite this he was wholehearted in his public support of Darwin. He was instrumental in developing scientific education in Britain, and fought against the more extreme versions of religious tradition.
In 1869 Huxley coined the term 'agnostic' to describe his own views on theology, a term whose use has continued to the present day (see Thomas Henry Huxley and agnosticism).
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Thomas Hobbes
Thomas Hobbes of Malmesbury (5 April 1588 – 4 December 1679), in some older texts Thomas Hobbs of Malmsbury, was an English philosopher, best known today for his work on political philosophy. His 1651 book Leviathan established the foundation for most of Western political philosophy from the perspective of social contract theory.
Hobbes was a champion of absolutism for the sovereign but he also developed some of the fundamentals of European liberal thought: the right of the individual; the natural equality of all men; the artificial character of the political order (which led to the later distinction between civil society and the state); the view that all legitimate political power must be "representative" and based on the consent of the people; and a liberal interpretation of law which leaves people free to do whatever the law does not explicitly forbid.
He was one of the founders of modern political philosophy. His understanding of humans as being matter and motion, obeying the same physical laws as other matter and motion, remains influential; and his account of human nature as self-interested cooperation, and of political communities as being based upon a "social contract" remains one of the major topics of political philosophy.
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Thomas Jefferson
Thomas Jefferson (April 13, 1743 (April 2, 1743 O.S.) – July 4, 1826) was an American Founding Father, the principal author of the United States Declaration of Independence (1776) and the third President of the United States (1801–1809). At the beginning of the American Revolution, Jefferson served in the Continental Congress, representing Virginia. He then served as a wartime Governor of Virginia (1779–1781). Just after the war ended, from mid-1784 Jefferson served as a diplomat, stationed in Paris, initially as a commissioner to help negotiate commercial treaties. In May 1785, he became the United States Minister to France. He was the first United States Secretary of State (1790–1793) during the administration of President George Washington. Upon resigning his office, with his close friend James Madison he organized the Democratic-Republican Party. Elected Vice-President in 1796, under his opponent John Adams, Jefferson with Madison secretly wrote the Kentucky and Virginia Resolutions, which attempted to nullify the Alien and Sedition Acts.
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Thomas Nagel
Thomas Nagel (born July 4, 1937) is an American philosopher, currently University Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University, where he has taught since 1980. His main areas of philosophical interest are philosophy of mind, political philosophy and ethics. He is well known for his critique of reductionist accounts of the mind in his essay "What Is It Like to Be a Bat?" (1974), and for his contributions to deontological and liberal moral and political theory in The Possibility of Altruism (1970) and subsequent writings.
Nagel was born July 4, 1937, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia (now Serbia) to a Jewish family. He received a BA from Cornell University in 1958, a BPhil from the University of Oxford in 1960, and a PhD from Harvard University in 1963 under the supervision of John Rawls. Before settling in New York, Nagel taught briefly at the University of California, Berkeley (from 1963 to 1966) and at Princeton University (from 1966 to 1980), where he trained many well-known philosophers including Susan Wolf, Shelly Kagan, and Samuel Scheffler, who is now his colleague at NYU. In 2006, he was made a member of the American Philosophical Society.
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Thomas Paine
Thomas Paine (January 29, 1737 (NS February 9, 1737) – June 8, 1809) was an English-American author, pamphleteer, radical, inventor, intellectual, revolutionary, and one of the Founding Fathers of the United States. He has been called "a corsetmaker by trade, a journalist by profession, and a propagandist by inclination."
Born in Thetford, England, in the county of Norfolk, Paine immigrated to the British American colonies in 1774 in time to participate in the American Revolution. His principal contributions were the powerful, widely read pamphlet Common Sense (1776), the all-time best-selling American book that advocated colonial America's independence from the Kingdom of Great Britain, and The American Crisis (1776–83), a pro-revolutionary pamphlet series. Common Sense was so influential that John Adams said, "Without the pen of the author of Common Sense, the sword of Washington would have been raised in vain.”
Paine lived in France for most of the 1790s, becoming deeply involved in the French Revolution. He wrote the Rights of Man (1791), in part a defense of the French Revolution against its critics. His attacks on British writer Edmund Burke led to a trial and conviction in absentia in 1792 for the crime of seditious libel. In 1792, despite not speaking French, he was elected to the French National Convention. The Girondists regarded him as an ally. Consequently, the Montagnards, especially Robespierre, regarded him as an enemy. In December of 1793, he was arrested and imprisoned in Paris, then released in 1794. He became notorious because of The Age of Reason (1793–94), his book that advocates deism, promotes reason and freethinking, and argues against institutionalized religion in general and Christian doctrine in particular. He also wrote the pamphlet Agrarian Justice (1795), discussing the origins of property, and introduced the concept of a guaranteed minimum income.
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Thomas Reid
The Reverend Thomas Reid FRSE (/riːd/; 7 May (26 April O.S.) 1710 – 7 October 1796), was a religiously trained Scottish philosopher, and a contemporary of David Hume, was the founder of the Scottish School of Common Sense, and played an integral role in the Scottish Enlightenment. The early part of his life was spent in Aberdeen, Scotland, where he created the 'Wise Club' (a literary-philosophical association) and graduated from the University of Aberdeen. He was given a professorship at King's College, Aberdeen in 1752, where he wrote An Inquiry Into the Human Mind on the Principles of Common Sense (published in 1764). Shortly afterward he was given the prestigious Professorship of Moral Philosophy at the University of Glasgow when he was called to replace Adam Smith. He resigned from this position in 1781.
Reid believed that common sense (in a special philosophical sense of sensus communis) is, or at least should be, at the foundation of all philosophical inquiry. He disagreed with Hume, who asserted that we can never know what an external world consists of as our knowledge is limited to the ideas in the mind, and George Berkeley, who asserted that the external world is merely ideas in the mind. By contrast, Reid claimed that the foundations upon which our sensus communis are built justify our belief that there is an external world.
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Vladimir Putin
Vladimir Vladimirovich Putin (Russian: Влади́мир Влади́мирович Пу́тин; IPA: [vɫɐˈdʲimʲɪr vɫɐˈdʲimʲɪrəvʲɪtɕ ˈputʲɪn] (
listen); born 7 October 1952) is a Russian politician who has been the President of Russia since 7 May 2012. Putin previously served as President from 2000 to 2008 and as Prime Minister of Russia from 1999 to 2000, and again from 2008 to 2012. Putin also serves as chairman of United Russia and Chairman of the Council of Ministers of the Union of Russia and Belarus. He became acting President on 31 December 1999, when president Boris Yeltsin resigned in a surprising move. Putin won the 2000 presidential election; in 2004 he was re-elected for a second term lasting until 7 May 2008.
Because of constitutionally mandated term limits, Putin was ineligible to run for a third consecutive presidential term. After his successor Dmitry Medvedev won the 2008 presidential election, Putin was nominated by Medvedev to be Russia's Prime Minister; Putin took office on 8 May 2008 and a period of so-called "tandemocracy" followed. In September 2011, Putin and Medvedev agreed he should seek a third, non-consecutive term in the 2012 presidential election, which he won in the first round on 4 March 2012.
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Voltaire
François-Marie Arouet de Voltaire (French pronunciation: [fʁɑ̃.swa ma.ʁi aʁ.wɛ]; 21 November 1694 – 30 May 1778), known by the pen name Voltaire (pronounced: [vɔl.tɛːʁ]), was a French Enlightenment writer, historian and philosopher famous for his wit and for his advocacy of civil liberties, including freedom of religion, freedom of expression, free trade and separation of church and state. Voltaire was a prolific writer, producing works in almost every literary form, including plays, poetry, novels, essays, and historical and scientific works. He wrote more than 20,000 letters and more than 2,000 books and pamphlets. He was an outspoken supporter of social reform, despite strict censorship laws with harsh penalties for those who broke them. As a satirical polemicist, he frequently made use of his works to criticize intolerance, religious dogma and the French institutions of his day.
Voltaire was one of several Enlightenment figures (along with Montesquieu, John Locke, Richard Price, Jean-Jacques Rousseau, and Émilie du Châtelet) whose works and ideas influenced important thinkers of both the American and French Revolutions.
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Wikipedia Persondata
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Wilfrid Sellars
Wilfrid Stalker Sellars (May 20, 1912 – July 2, 1989) was an American philosopher. His father was the Canadian-American philosopher Roy Wood Sellars, a leading American philosophical naturalist in the first half of the twentieth-century. Wilfrid was educated at the University of Michigan (BA 1933), the University at Buffalo, and Oxford, where he was a Rhodes Scholar, obtaining his highest earned degree, an MA, in 1940. During WWII, he served in military intelligence. He then taught at the University of Iowa, the University of Minnesota, Yale University, and from 1963 until his death, at the University of Pittsburgh. He served as president of the Metaphysical Society of America in 1977.
Sellars is best known as a critic of foundationalist epistemology, but his philosophical works are more generally directed toward the ultimate goal of reconciling intuitive ways of describing the world (both those of common sense and traditional philosophy) with a thoroughly naturalist, scientific account of reality. He is widely regarded both for great sophistication of argument and for his assimilation of many and diverse subjects in pursuit of a synoptic vision. Sellars was perhaps the first philosopher to synthesize elements of American pragmatism with elements of British and American analytic philosophy and Austrian and German logical positivism. His work also reflects a sustained engagement with the German tradition of transcendental idealism, most obviously in his book Science and Metaphysics: Kantian Variations.
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Wilhelm Windelband
Wilhelm Windelband (May 11, 1848, Potsdam – October 22, 1915, Heidelberg) was a German philosopher of the Baden School.
Windelband is now mainly remembered for the terms nomothetic and idiographic, which he introduced. These have currency in psychology and other areas, though not necessarily in line with his original meanings. Windelband was a neo-Kantian who protested other neo-Kantians of his time and maintained that "to understand Kant rightly means to go beyond him". Against his positivist contemporaries, Windelband argued that philosophy should engage in humanistic dialogue with the natural sciences rather than uncritically appropriating its methodologies. His interests in psychology and cultural sciences represented an opposition to psychologism and historicism schools by a critical philosophic system.
Windelband relied in his effort to reach beyond Kant on such philosophers as Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Johann Friedrich Herbart and Hermann Lotze. Closely associated with Windelband was Heinrich Rickert. Windelband's disciples were not only noted philosophers, but sociologists like Max Weber and theologians like Ernst Troeltsch and Albert Schweitzer.
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Wilhelm Wundt
Wilhelm Maximilian Wundt (16 August 1832 - 31 August 1920 in Germany) was a German physician, psychologist, physiologist, philosopher, and professor, known today as one of the founding figures of modern psychology. He is widely regarded as the "father of experimental psychology". In 1879, Wundt founded the first formal laboratory for psychological research at the University of Leipzig.
By creating this laboratory he was able to explore the nature of religious beliefs, identify mental disorders and abnormal behavior, and find damaged parts of the brain. In doing so, he was able to establish psychology as a separate science from other topics. He also formed the first journal for psychological research in 1881.
Asteroids 635 Vundtia and 11040 Wundt are named in his honour.
Wundt was born at Neckarau, Baden on August 16th, 1832 (now part of Mannheim), the fourth child to parents Maximilian Wundt (a Lutheran minister), and his wife Marie Frederike. When about four years of age, Wundt's family moved to Heidelsheim which was known to be a small town. He studied from 1851 to 1856 at the University of Tübingen, University of Heidelberg, and the University of Berlin. After graduating in medicine from Heidelberg (1856), Wundt studied briefly with Johannes Peter Müller, before joining the University's staff, becoming an assistant to the physicist and physiologist Hermann von Helmholtz in 1858. There he wrote Contributions to the Theory of Sense Perception (1858–62). In 1865, he wrote a textbook about human physiology. In 1867 he became a professor in acquainting medical students with the exact physical needs for medical investigation. In 1874, he became a professor of "Inductive Philosophy" in Zurich. In 1875, he moved back to Leipzig.
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William Alston
William Payne Alston (November 29, 1921, Shreveport, Louisiana September 13, 2009, Jamesville, New York) was an American philosopher. He made influential contributions to the philosophy of language, epistemology and Christian philosophy. He earned his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago and taught at Syracuse University, Rutgers University and the University of Michigan.
His views on foundationalism, internalism versus externalism, speech acts, and the epistemic value of mystical experience, among many other topics, have been very influential. Like most American philosophers, Alston is counted among the analytic philosophers.
Together with Alvin Plantinga, Nicholas Wolterstorff, and Robert Adams, Alston helped to found the journal Faith and Philosophy and the Society of Christian Philosophers. With Plantinga, Wolterstorff, and others, Alston was also responsible for the development of "Reformed epistemology" (a term that Alston, an Episcopalian, never fully endorsed), one of the most important contributions to Christian thought in the twentieth century. Alston was president of the American Philosophical Association in 1979 and was widely recognized as one of the core figures in the late twentieth-century revival of the philosophy of religion. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1990.
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William Blackstone
Sir William Blackstone KC SL (10 July 1723 – 14 February 1780) was an English jurist, judge and Tory politician of the eighteenth century. He is most noted for writing the Commentaries on the Laws of England. Born into a middle class family in London, Blackstone was educated at Charterhouse School before matriculating at Pembroke College, Oxford in 1738. After switching to and completing a Bachelor of Civil Law degree, he was made a Fellow of All Souls, Oxford on 2 November 1743, admitted to Middle Temple, and called to the Bar there in 1746. Following a slow start to his career as a barrister, Blackstone became heavily involved in university administration, becoming accountant, treasurer and bursar on 28 November 1746 and Senior Bursar in 1750. Blackstone is considered responsible for completing the Codrington Library and Warton Building, and simplifying the complex accounting system used by the college. On 3 July 1753 he formally gave up his practise as a barrister and instead embarked on a series of lectures on English law, the first of their kind. These were massively successful, earning him a total of £56,000 in 2012 terms, and led to the publication of An Analysis of the Laws of England in 1756, which repeatedly sold out and was used to preface his later works.
wn.com/William_Blackstone -
William James
William James (January 11, 1842 – August 26, 1910) was a pioneering American psychologist and philosopher who was trained as a physician. He was the first educator to offer a psychology course in the U.S. He wrote influential books on the young science of psychology, educational psychology, psychology of religious experience and mysticism, and on the philosophy of pragmatism. He was the brother of novelist Henry James and of diarist Alice James. In the summer of 1878, James married Alice Gibbens.
William James was born at the Astor House in New York City. He was the son of Henry James Sr., a noted and independently wealthy Swedenborgian theologian well acquainted with the literary and intellectual elites of his day. The intellectual brilliance of the James family milieu and the remarkable epistolary talents of several of its members have made them a subject of continuing interest to historians, biographers, and critics.
James interacted with a wide array of writers and scholars throughout his life, including his godfather Ralph Waldo Emerson, his godson William James Sidis, as well as Charles Sanders Peirce, Bertrand Russell, Josiah Royce, Ernst Mach, John Dewey, Macedonio Fernández, Walter Lippmann, Mark Twain, Horatio Alger, Jr., Henri Bergson and Sigmund Freud.
wn.com/William_James -
William Lane Craig
William Lane Craig (born August 23, 1949) is an American analytic philosopher, philosophical theologian, and Christian apologist. He is known for his work in the philosophy of religion, philosophy of time, and the defense of Christian theism. One of his most notable contributions to the philosophy of religion is his defense of the Kalām cosmological argument, which is the most widely discussed argument for the existence of God in contemporary Western philosophy. In theology, he has also defended Molinism and the belief that God is, since Creation, subject to time.
Craig has authored or edited over 30 books, including The Kalām Cosmological Argument (1979), The Cosmological Argument from Plato to Leibniz (1980), Theism, Atheism, and Big Bang Cosmology (with Quentin Smith, 1993), Philosophical Foundations for a Christian Worldview (with J.P. Moreland, 2003) and Reasonable Faith: Christian Truth and Apologetics (3d edition, 2008).
Craig received a Bachelor of Arts degree in communications from Wheaton College, Illinois, in 1971 and two summa cum laude master's degrees from Trinity Evangelical Divinity School in Deerfield, Illinois, in 1975, in philosophy of religion and ecclesiastical history. He earned a Ph.D. in philosophy under John Hick at the University of Birmingham, England in 1977 and a Th.D. under Wolfhart Pannenberg at the University of Munich in 1984.
wn.com/William_Lane_Craig -
William of Ockham
William of Ockham ( /ˈɒkəm/; also Occam, Hockham, or several other spellings; c. 1288 – c. 1348) was an English Franciscan friar and scholastic philosopher, who is believed to have been born in Ockham, a small village in Surrey. He is considered to be one of the major figures of medieval thought and was at the centre of the major intellectual and political controversies of the fourteenth century. Although he is commonly known for Ockham's razor, the methodological principle that bears his name, William of Ockham also produced significant works on logic, physics, and theology. In the Church of England, his day of commemoration is 10 April.
William of Ockham joined the Franciscan order at an early age. It is believed that he studied theology at the University of Oxford from 1309 to 1321, but never completed his master's degree (the usual undergraduate degree in those times). Because of this, he acquired the byname Venerabilis Inceptor, or "Worthy Beginner" (an inceptor was a student formally admitted to the ranks of teachers by the university authorities). He was also known as the Doctor Invincibilis or "Unconquerable Teacher."
wn.com/William_of_Ockham -
William Whewell
William Whewell ( /ˈhjuːəl/ HEW-əl; 24 May 1794 – 6 March 1866) was an English polymath, scientist, Anglican priest, philosopher, theologian, and historian of science. He was Master of Trinity College, Cambridge.
Whewell was born in Lancaster. His father, a carpenter, wished him to follow his trade, but his success in mathematics at Lancaster and Heversham grammar schools won him an exhibition (a type of scholarship) at Trinity College, Cambridge (1812). In 1814 he was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal for poetry. He was Second Wrangler in 1816, President of the Cambridge Union Society in 1817, became fellow and tutor of his college, and, in 1841, succeeded Dr Christopher Wordsworth as master. He was professor of mineralogy from 1828 to 1832 and Knightbridge Professor of Philosophy (then called "moral theology and casuistical divinity") from 1838 to 1855.
Whewell died in Cambridge 1866 as a result of a fall from his horse.
Full bibliographical details are given by Isaac Todhunter, W. Whewell: an Account of his Writings (2 vols., 1876). See also Life of W. Whewell, by Mrs Stair Douglas (1881).
wn.com/William_Whewell -
William Wollaston
William Wollaston (26 March 1659 – 29 October 1724) was an English philosophical writer. He is remembered today for one book, which he completed only two years before his death: The Religion of Nature Delineated (1st ed. 1722; 2nd ed. 1724).
He was born at Coton Clanford in Staffordshire, on 26 March 1659. He was born to a family long-established in Staffordshire, and was distantly related to Sir John Wollaston, the Alderman and Lord Mayor of London. At the age of ten, he began school at a Latin school newly opened in Shenstone, Staffordshire, and continued in country free schools until he was admitted to Sidney Sussex College, Cambridge, at the age of 15, in June 1674.
After leaving Cambridge in September 1681, he became an assistant master at King Edward's School, Birmingham and took holy orders. At this time, he became Perpetual curate of St Mary's Church, Moseley from 1684 - 1686. In 1688 an uncle left him a fortune and an estate at Shenton Hall, Leicestershire, and in November of the same year he settled in London. On 26 November 1689, he married Catharine Charlton. They had eleven children together, four of whom died within his lifetime. They lived happily together for 30 years, until Catharine's death on 21 July 1720. Wollaston also published anonymously a small book, On the Design of the Book of Ecclesiastes, or the Unreasonableness of Men's Restless Contention for the Present Enjoyments, represented in an English Poem (London, 1691).
wn.com/William_Wollaston -
Zechariah Chafee
Zechariah Chafee, Jr. (December 7, 1885 – February 8, 1957) was an American judicial philosopher and civil libertarian. An advocate for free speech, he was described by Senator Joseph McCarthy as "dangerous" to the United States. Legal scholar Richard Primus called Chafee “possibly the most important First Amendment scholar of the first half of the twentieth century.”
Born in Providence, Rhode Island, he graduated from Brown University, where he was a member of Alpha Delta Phi, in 1907. Later, he received a law degree from Harvard University, completing his LL.B. in 1913. He practiced at the law firm of Tillinghast & Collins from 1913-1916. He became a professor at Harvard in 1916, where he remained until 1956.
Chafee wrote several works about civil liberties, including:
File:Freedom of speech in war times.djvu
Chafee's first significant work (Freedom of Speech) established modern First Amendment theory. Inspired by the United States' suppression of radical speech and ideas during the First World War, Chafee edited and updated a collection of several of his law review articles. In these individual articles-cum-chapters, he assessed significant World War I cases, including those of Emma Goldman.
wn.com/Zechariah_Chafee -
Émile Durkheim
David Émile Durkheim (French pronunciation: [emil dyʁˈkɛm], [dyʁˈkajm]) (April 15, 1858 – November 15, 1917) was a French sociologist. He formally established the academic discipline and, with Karl Marx and Max Weber, is commonly cited as the principal architect of modern social science and father of sociology.
Much of Durkheim's work was concerned with how societies could maintain their integrity and coherence in modernity; an era in which traditional social and religious ties are no longer assumed, and in which new social institutions have come into being. His first major sociological work was The Division of Labor in Society (1893). In 1895, he published his Rules of the Sociological Method and set up the first European department of sociology, becoming France's first professor of sociology. In 1898, he established the journal L'Année Sociologique. Durkheim's seminal monograph, Suicide (1897), a study of suicide rates amongst Catholic and Protestant populations, pioneered modern social research and served to distinguish social science from psychology and political philosophy. The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), presented a theory of religion, comparing the social and cultural lives of aboriginal and modern societies.
wn.com/Émile_Durkheim
From Monty Python's "Live at the Hollywood Bowl"
Transcribed by John Daley jdaley@picasso.ocis.temple.edu
Immanuel Kant was a real pissant who was very rarely stable,
Heidegger, Heidegger was a boozy beggar who could think you under the table,
David Hume could out-consume Schopenhauer and Hegel,
And Wittgenstein was a beery swine who was just as schloshed as Schlegel.
There's nothing Nietzsche couldn't teach ya 'bout the turning of the wrist,
Socrates himself was permanently pissed...
John Stuart Mill, of his own free will, with half a pint of shandy was
particularly ill,
Plato, they say, could stick it away, half a crate of whiskey every day,
Aristotle, Aristotle was a beggar for the bottle,
Hobbes was fond of his dram,
And Rene Descartes was a drunken fart, "I drink therefore I am."
Yes, Socrates himself is particularly missed;
Matching books:
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
\xdcber die Vulkane im Monde
Von der Macht des Gem\xfcts, durch den blo\xdfen Vorsatz seiner krankhaften Gef\xfchle Meister zu sein
Fundamental Principles of the Metaphysic of Morals
Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufkl\xe4rung?
Tr\xe4ume eines Geistersehers, erl\xe4utert durch Tr\xe4ume der Metaphysik
Phebe, the Blackberry Girl
The Critique of Practical Reason
Film: Several Different Atomic Detonations
Was hei\xdft: sich im Denken orientieren?
The Metaphysical Elements of Ethics
Kritik der reinen Vernunft
The Critique of Pure Reason
Famous quotes by Immanuel Kant:
"So act that your principle of action might safely be made a law for the whole world."
"Do what is right, though the world may perish"
"Always recognize that human individuals are ends, and do not use them as means to your end."
"Science is organized knowledge. Wisdom is organized life."
"It is beyond a doubt that all our knowledge that begins with experience."
"Experience without theory is blind, but theory without experience is mere intellectual play."
"If man makes himself a worm he must not complain when he is trodden on."
"Immaturity is the incapacity to use one's intelligence without the guidance of another."
"He who is cruel to animals becomes hard also in his dealings with men. We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals."
"Two things awe me most, the starry sky above me and the moral law within me."
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Three Minute Philosophy - Immanuel Kant
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:32
- Updated: 22 Feb 2013
No grey areas.
http://wn.com/Three_Minute_Philosophy_Immanuel_Kant
IMMANUEL KANT : CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:33
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
Webcast lecture on Kant's critique of pure reason produced for the history and context of journalism course at the university of winchester in the UK. This video is the first ten minutes of a 40 minute discussion which continues at:"journalism.winchester.ac.uk
http://wn.com/IMMANUEL_KANT_CRITIQUE_OF_PURE_REASON
Webcast lecture on Kant's critique of pure reason produced for the history and context of journalism course at the university of winchester in the UK. This video is the first ten minutes of a 40 minute discussion which continues at:"journalism.winchester.ac.uk
- published: 08 Feb 2010
- views: 43152
- author: Winchesterjournalism
IMMANUEL KANT BY CHRISTOPHER INSOLE
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 24:52
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website for more information and to access our online editions of our timelines.www.stjt.org.uk
http://wn.com/IMMANUEL_KANT_BY_CHRISTOPHER_INSOLE
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website for more information and to access our online editions of our timelines.www.stjt.org.uk
- published: 10 Mar 2012
- views: 5874
- author: StJohnsNottingham
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 19:33
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
www.philosophybites.com Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large part of Kant's work addresses the question "What can we know?" The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access only to the empirical realm of space and time. Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists' notion that pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are necessary for experience of ...
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_1724-1804_Metaphysics
www.philosophybites.com Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large part of Kant's work addresses the question "What can we know?" The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access only to the empirical realm of space and time. Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists' notion that pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are necessary for experience of ...
- published: 20 Aug 2011
- views: 12983
- author: pangeaprogressredux
IMMANUEL KANT ON MORALITY
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:19
- Updated: 15 Feb 2013
A video about immanuel kant and morality. This is the first ten minutes of a 30 minute discussion. The video continues at this URL: "journalism.winchester.ac.uk The discussion takes in Kant's ideas about the metaphysical basis of his system, including the centrality of the categorical imperative, and links to his system as a whole.
http://wn.com/IMMANUEL_KANT_ON_MORALITY
A video about immanuel kant and morality. This is the first ten minutes of a 30 minute discussion. The video continues at this URL: "journalism.winchester.ac.uk The discussion takes in Kant's ideas about the metaphysical basis of his system, including the centrality of the categorical imperative, and links to his system as a whole.
- published: 11 Feb 2010
- views: 20393
- author: Winchesterjournalism
2. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:23
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
http://wn.com/2_David_Hume's_Fork_and_Immanuel_Kant's_Synthetic_A_Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- published: 13 Feb 2010
- views: 7165
- author: drjasonjcampbell
1. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:21
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
http://wn.com/1_David_Hume's_Fork_and_Immanuel_Kant's_Synthetic_A_Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- published: 13 Feb 2010
- views: 14173
- author: drjasonjcampbell
Immanuel Kant Song
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:56
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
"The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding" Translation by Roderick T. Long Music and vocals by Paul L. Fine PLEASE NOTE: The audio for this video was NOT made by me. I merely found the song online and made the video. Also, I do not have piano tabs for the song. The song may be downloaded here: www.auburn.edu
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Song
"The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding" Translation by Roderick T. Long Music and vocals by Paul L. Fine PLEASE NOTE: The audio for this video was NOT made by me. I merely found the song online and made the video. Also, I do not have piano tabs for the song. The song may be downloaded here: www.auburn.edu
- published: 19 May 2008
- views: 166969
- author: LennyBound
Immanuel Kant: The Great Synthesizer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:43
- Updated: 29 Jan 2013
This clip describes Immanuel Kant's great synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist philosophical traditions. Kant famously stated "Percepts without concepts are empty; concepts without percepts are blind." Kant argues that our experience of reality is not merely passive, but rather that the mind actively structures how we encounter the world. The clip then explains the difference between analytic/synthetic judgments and a priori/a posteriori judgments. It then closes with a brief description of Kant's deontological ethical theory, and his critique of metaphysics.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_The_Great_Synthesizer
This clip describes Immanuel Kant's great synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist philosophical traditions. Kant famously stated "Percepts without concepts are empty; concepts without percepts are blind." Kant argues that our experience of reality is not merely passive, but rather that the mind actively structures how we encounter the world. The clip then explains the difference between analytic/synthetic judgments and a priori/a posteriori judgments. It then closes with a brief description of Kant's deontological ethical theory, and his critique of metaphysics.
- published: 19 May 2009
- views: 43686
- author: LennyBound
Immanuel Kant - Top 10 Quotes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:51
- Updated: 08 Feb 2013
The ten best quotes by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (1724 - 1804) See all quotes by Immanuel Kant at www.iperceptive.com Enlighten yourself at www.iPerceptive.com Like iPerceptive at Facebook http Follow iPerceptive at Twitter twitter.com
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Top_10_Quotes
The ten best quotes by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (1724 - 1804) See all quotes by Immanuel Kant at www.iperceptive.com Enlighten yourself at www.iPerceptive.com Like iPerceptive at Facebook http Follow iPerceptive at Twitter twitter.com
- published: 26 Sep 2011
- views: 3529
- author: iPerceptive
1. Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:21
- Updated: 10 Feb 2013
www.jasonjcampbell.org
http://wn.com/1_Immanuel_Kant_Prolegomena_to_any_Future_Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment? (Summary)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:14
- Updated: 12 Feb 2013
Not my normal video, school project.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_What_is_Enlightenment?_Summary
Immanuel Kant - Critique of Judgement (Lecture) part 1/2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:10
- Updated: 21 Feb 2013
Professor Louis Markos giving a lecture on Kant's aesthetic system.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Critique_of_Judgement_Lecture_part_1_2
Professor Louis Markos giving a lecture on Kant's aesthetic system.
- published: 19 Jul 2011
- views: 5959
- author: eddontheman
Immanuel Kant on Education, Clip 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:57
- Updated: 24 Nov 2012
Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College and CEE's Executive Director, presents a series of lectures on the philosophy of education. In Part 7, Dr. Hicks covers the first of the seven "isms" — Idealism. In this section, he discusses the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's views on education.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_on_Education,_Clip_1
Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College and CEE's Executive Director, presents a series of lectures on the philosophy of education. In Part 7, Dr. Hicks covers the first of the seven "isms" — Idealism. In this section, he discusses the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's views on education.
- published: 12 Apr 2010
- views: 1650
- author: CEEChannel
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:00
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
http://wn.com/La_aventura_del_pensamiento_Immanuel_Kant,_PARTE_I
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
- published: 21 Aug 2009
- views: 89027
- author: IMAGOEXISTENCIALISTA
Formalism: Immanuel Kant
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:46
- Updated: 30 Dec 2012
A video by Dr. Bill Noonan for students at Columbia Gorge Community College
http://wn.com/Formalism_Immanuel_Kant
A video by Dr. Bill Noonan for students at Columbia Gorge Community College
- published: 14 Sep 2011
- views: 952
- author: cgcclive
19. Lecture Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 11:00
- Updated: 16 Jan 2013
www.jasonjcampbell.org
http://wn.com/19_Lecture_Immanuel_Kant_Prolegomena_to_any_Future_Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant - Was ist Aufklärung? 1/2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:14
- Updated: 17 Feb 2013
Basistexte europäischer Philosophie Playlist: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Was_ist_Aufklärung?_1_2
Basistexte europäischer Philosophie Playlist: www.youtube.com
- published: 27 Mar 2011
- views: 24947
- author: 1201cbhd
6. Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:25
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
www.jasonjcampbell.org
http://wn.com/6_Immanuel_Kant_Prolegomena_to_any_Future_Metaphysics
5. Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:59
- Updated: 20 Nov 2012
www.jasonjcampbell.org
http://wn.com/5_Immanuel_Kant_Prolegomena_to_any_Future_Metaphysics
8. Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:46
- Updated: 12 Feb 2013
jasonjcampbell.org Full playlist here: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/8_Immanuel_Kant_Prolegomena_to_any_Future_Metaphysics
jasonjcampbell.org Full playlist here: www.youtube.com
- published: 08 Dec 2010
- views: 662
- author: drjasonjcampbell
Immanuel Kant - Philosophy (ethics) Part:1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:44
- Updated: 23 Sep 2012
Department of philosophy. Government College University. Made By: Mohsin Ahmed Khan
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Philosophy_ethics_Part1
Department of philosophy. Government College University. Made By: Mohsin Ahmed Khan
- published: 24 Jul 2010
- views: 3330
- author: mohsin9201867
Immanuel Kant
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:30
- Updated: 19 Jan 2013
Os principais pensamentos kantianos...
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant
Os principais pensamentos kantianos...
- published: 11 Jun 2009
- views: 8006
- author: raquelfioramonte25
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Three Minute Philosophy - Immanuel Kant
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 3:32
- Updated: 22 Feb 2013
No grey areas.
http://wn.com/Three_Minute_Philosophy_Immanuel_Kant
IMMANUEL KANT BY CHRISTOPHER INSOLE
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 24:52
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website for more information and to access our online editions of our timelines.www.stjt.org.uk
http://wn.com/IMMANUEL_KANT_BY_CHRISTOPHER_INSOLE
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website for more information and to access our online editions of our timelines.www.stjt.org.uk
- published: 10 Mar 2012
- views: 5874
- author: StJohnsNottingham
IMMANUEL KANT : CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:33
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
Webcast lecture on Kant's critique of pure reason produced for the history and context of journalism course at the university of winchester in the UK. This video is the first ten minutes of a 40 minute discussion which continues at:"journalism.winchester.ac.uk
http://wn.com/IMMANUEL_KANT_CRITIQUE_OF_PURE_REASON
Webcast lecture on Kant's critique of pure reason produced for the history and context of journalism course at the university of winchester in the UK. This video is the first ten minutes of a 40 minute discussion which continues at:"journalism.winchester.ac.uk
- published: 08 Feb 2010
- views: 43152
- author: Winchesterjournalism
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 19:33
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
www.philosophybites.com Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large part of Kant's work addresses the question "What can we know?" The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access only to the empirical realm of space and time. Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists' notion that pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are necessary for experience of ...
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_1724-1804_Metaphysics
www.philosophybites.com Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large part of Kant's work addresses the question "What can we know?" The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access only to the empirical realm of space and time. Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists' notion that pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are necessary for experience of ...
- published: 20 Aug 2011
- views: 12983
- author: pangeaprogressredux
IMMANUEL KANT ON MORALITY
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:19
- Updated: 15 Feb 2013
A video about immanuel kant and morality. This is the first ten minutes of a 30 minute discussion. The video continues at this URL: "journalism.winchester.ac.uk The discussion takes in Kant's ideas about the metaphysical basis of his system, including the centrality of the categorical imperative, and links to his system as a whole.
http://wn.com/IMMANUEL_KANT_ON_MORALITY
A video about immanuel kant and morality. This is the first ten minutes of a 30 minute discussion. The video continues at this URL: "journalism.winchester.ac.uk The discussion takes in Kant's ideas about the metaphysical basis of his system, including the centrality of the categorical imperative, and links to his system as a whole.
- published: 11 Feb 2010
- views: 20393
- author: Winchesterjournalism
2. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 9:23
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
http://wn.com/2_David_Hume's_Fork_and_Immanuel_Kant's_Synthetic_A_Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- published: 13 Feb 2010
- views: 7165
- author: drjasonjcampbell
1. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:21
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
http://wn.com/1_David_Hume's_Fork_and_Immanuel_Kant's_Synthetic_A_Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- published: 13 Feb 2010
- views: 14173
- author: drjasonjcampbell
Immanuel Kant: The Great Synthesizer
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 7:43
- Updated: 29 Jan 2013
This clip describes Immanuel Kant's great synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist philosophical traditions. Kant famously stated "Percepts without concepts are empty; concepts without percepts are blind." Kant argues that our experience of reality is not merely passive, but rather that the mind actively structures how we encounter the world. The clip then explains the difference between analytic/synthetic judgments and a priori/a posteriori judgments. It then closes with a brief description of Kant's deontological ethical theory, and his critique of metaphysics.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_The_Great_Synthesizer
This clip describes Immanuel Kant's great synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist philosophical traditions. Kant famously stated "Percepts without concepts are empty; concepts without percepts are blind." Kant argues that our experience of reality is not merely passive, but rather that the mind actively structures how we encounter the world. The clip then explains the difference between analytic/synthetic judgments and a priori/a posteriori judgments. It then closes with a brief description of Kant's deontological ethical theory, and his critique of metaphysics.
- published: 19 May 2009
- views: 43686
- author: LennyBound
Immanuel Kant - Top 10 Quotes
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:51
- Updated: 08 Feb 2013
The ten best quotes by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (1724 - 1804) See all quotes by Immanuel Kant at www.iperceptive.com Enlighten yourself at www.iPerceptive.com Like iPerceptive at Facebook http Follow iPerceptive at Twitter twitter.com
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Top_10_Quotes
The ten best quotes by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (1724 - 1804) See all quotes by Immanuel Kant at www.iperceptive.com Enlighten yourself at www.iPerceptive.com Like iPerceptive at Facebook http Follow iPerceptive at Twitter twitter.com
- published: 26 Sep 2011
- views: 3529
- author: iPerceptive
Immanuel Kant - Critique of Judgement (Lecture) part 1/2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 14:10
- Updated: 21 Feb 2013
Professor Louis Markos giving a lecture on Kant's aesthetic system.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Critique_of_Judgement_Lecture_part_1_2
Professor Louis Markos giving a lecture on Kant's aesthetic system.
- published: 19 Jul 2011
- views: 5959
- author: eddontheman
1. Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:21
- Updated: 10 Feb 2013
www.jasonjcampbell.org
http://wn.com/1_Immanuel_Kant_Prolegomena_to_any_Future_Metaphysics
Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment? (Summary)
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:14
- Updated: 12 Feb 2013
Not my normal video, school project.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_What_is_Enlightenment?_Summary
Immanuel Kant Song
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 4:56
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
"The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding" Translation by Roderick T. Long Music and vocals by Paul L. Fine PLEASE NOTE: The audio for this video was NOT made by me. I merely found the song online and made the video. Also, I do not have piano tabs for the song. The song may be downloaded here: www.auburn.edu
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Song
"The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding" Translation by Roderick T. Long Music and vocals by Paul L. Fine PLEASE NOTE: The audio for this video was NOT made by me. I merely found the song online and made the video. Also, I do not have piano tabs for the song. The song may be downloaded here: www.auburn.edu
- published: 19 May 2008
- views: 166969
- author: LennyBound
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:00
- Updated: 20 Feb 2013
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
http://wn.com/La_aventura_del_pensamiento_Immanuel_Kant,_PARTE_I
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
- published: 21 Aug 2009
- views: 89027
- author: IMAGOEXISTENCIALISTA
Afl. 7 Durf te Denken - IMMANUEL KANT
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 24:31
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
Zie ook www.facebook.com of www.durftedenken.nl presentatie Farid Tabarki animaties: Sverre Fredriksen & Leander Huizinga sound design and music: Bailey Math & Michael Resnick research: Josephine Krikke, Anne-Greet van Rootselaer, Esther Wit regie film-item: Ayfer Ergün montage: Jan Willem Looze samenstelling en studio-regie: Eveline van Dijck IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) Aan Kant danken we het idee van de autonome mens; de mens die voor zichzelf denkt, en zich niet onmondig laat leiden door een ander. 'Sapere aude!' schrijft Kant in 1784. Ofwel: 'Durf te denken! Kant laat in zijn 'Kritiek van de zuivere rede' zien dat er een grens is aan wat we kunnen kennen. In die tijd deden filosofen uitspraken over het bestaan van God of de onsterfelijkheid van de ziel, maar volgens Kant is dat louter speculatie. In de beroemde categorisch imperatief geeft Kant een criterium: handel volgens dat principe waarvan je zou willen dat het een algemene wet wordt. Een autonoom mens weet dat hij niet egoïstisch zijn gang kan gaan. Als immers iedereen dat zou doen, gaat het ten koste van ieders vrijheid. De mens is onderhevig aan natuurwetten, en tegelijkertijd -- als moreel wezen -- autonoom. Gastspreker in deze aflevering is filosoof Ad Verbrugge. Politie Groningen Ayfer Ergün maakte een reportage over de relatie tussen Kant en de politie. De prestaties van de Nederlandse politie worden de laatste jaren vooral in cijfers uitgedrukt. Maar politiewerk is mensenwerk dat niet volledig in cijfers te ...
http://wn.com/Afl_7_Durf_te_Denken_IMMANUEL_KANT
Zie ook www.facebook.com of www.durftedenken.nl presentatie Farid Tabarki animaties: Sverre Fredriksen & Leander Huizinga sound design and music: Bailey Math & Michael Resnick research: Josephine Krikke, Anne-Greet van Rootselaer, Esther Wit regie film-item: Ayfer Ergün montage: Jan Willem Looze samenstelling en studio-regie: Eveline van Dijck IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) Aan Kant danken we het idee van de autonome mens; de mens die voor zichzelf denkt, en zich niet onmondig laat leiden door een ander. 'Sapere aude!' schrijft Kant in 1784. Ofwel: 'Durf te denken! Kant laat in zijn 'Kritiek van de zuivere rede' zien dat er een grens is aan wat we kunnen kennen. In die tijd deden filosofen uitspraken over het bestaan van God of de onsterfelijkheid van de ziel, maar volgens Kant is dat louter speculatie. In de beroemde categorisch imperatief geeft Kant een criterium: handel volgens dat principe waarvan je zou willen dat het een algemene wet wordt. Een autonoom mens weet dat hij niet egoïstisch zijn gang kan gaan. Als immers iedereen dat zou doen, gaat het ten koste van ieders vrijheid. De mens is onderhevig aan natuurwetten, en tegelijkertijd -- als moreel wezen -- autonoom. Gastspreker in deze aflevering is filosoof Ad Verbrugge. Politie Groningen Ayfer Ergün maakte een reportage over de relatie tussen Kant en de politie. De prestaties van de Nederlandse politie worden de laatste jaren vooral in cijfers uitgedrukt. Maar politiewerk is mensenwerk dat niet volledig in cijfers te ...
- published: 17 Dec 2011
- views: 3736
- author: omroepHUMAN
Verstehen Sie Kant?
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 54:38
- Updated: 22 Feb 2013
Aus der Reihe "Sternstunde Philosophie" - Was kann ich wissen? - Was soll ich tun? - Was darf ich hoffen?
http://wn.com/Verstehen_Sie_Kant?
Aus der Reihe "Sternstunde Philosophie" - Was kann ich wissen? - Was soll ich tun? - Was darf ich hoffen?
- published: 27 Dec 2011
- views: 1590
- author: Martin Mützenberg
Immanuel Kant
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 19:45
- Updated: 21 Feb 2013
Kant é famoso sobretudo pela elaboração do denominado idealismo transcendental: todos nós trazemos formas e conceitos a priori (aqueles que não vêm da experiência) para a experiência concreta do mundo, os quais seriam de outra forma impossíveis de determinar. A filosofia da natureza e da natureza humana de Kant é historicamente uma das mais determinantes fontes do relativismo conceptual que dominou a vida intelectual do século XX. No entanto, é muito provável que Kant rejeitasse o relativismo nas formas contemporâneas, como por exemplo o Pós-modernismo. Kant é também conhecido pela filosofia moral e pela proposta, a primeira moderna, de uma teoria da formação do sistema solar, conhecida como a hipótese Kant-Laplace.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant
Kant é famoso sobretudo pela elaboração do denominado idealismo transcendental: todos nós trazemos formas e conceitos a priori (aqueles que não vêm da experiência) para a experiência concreta do mundo, os quais seriam de outra forma impossíveis de determinar. A filosofia da natureza e da natureza humana de Kant é historicamente uma das mais determinantes fontes do relativismo conceptual que dominou a vida intelectual do século XX. No entanto, é muito provável que Kant rejeitasse o relativismo nas formas contemporâneas, como por exemplo o Pós-modernismo. Kant é também conhecido pela filosofia moral e pela proposta, a primeira moderna, de uma teoria da formação do sistema solar, conhecida como a hipótese Kant-Laplace.
- published: 11 Oct 2011
- views: 19995
- author: Faccenter Pires
Immanuel Kant on Education, Clip 1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 5:57
- Updated: 24 Nov 2012
Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College and CEE's Executive Director, presents a series of lectures on the philosophy of education. In Part 7, Dr. Hicks covers the first of the seven "isms" — Idealism. In this section, he discusses the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's views on education.
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_on_Education,_Clip_1
Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College and CEE's Executive Director, presents a series of lectures on the philosophy of education. In Part 7, Dr. Hicks covers the first of the seven "isms" — Idealism. In this section, he discusses the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's views on education.
- published: 12 Apr 2010
- views: 1650
- author: CEEChannel
Denker des Abendlandes - 31 - Immanuel Kant - Der Höhepunkt der Aufklärung
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 29:56
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
Denker des Abendlandes - 31 - Immanuel Kant - Der Höhepunkt der Aufklärung
http://wn.com/Denker_des_Abendlandes_31_Immanuel_Kant_Der_Höhepunkt_der_Aufklärung
Denker des Abendlandes - 31 - Immanuel Kant - Der Höhepunkt der Aufklärung
- published: 04 Oct 2011
- views: 9505
- author: Daniel Michel
Immanuel Kant - Was ist Aufklärung? 1/2
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 10:14
- Updated: 17 Feb 2013
Basistexte europäischer Philosophie Playlist: www.youtube.com
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Was_ist_Aufklärung?_1_2
Basistexte europäischer Philosophie Playlist: www.youtube.com
- published: 27 Mar 2011
- views: 24947
- author: 1201cbhd
Immanuel Kant: der Weltweise aus Königsberg
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 20:51
- Updated: 19 Feb 2013
Niemand, Jesus Christus vielleicht ausgenommen, hat das Denken und die Wertvorstellungen der Deutschen nachhaltiger beeinflusst als Immanuel Kant: den "typisch deutschen" Hang zum Grübeln etwa oder das sprichwörtliche preußische Pflichtbewusstsein. Dabei war Kants Denken eher kosmopolitisch
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_der_Weltweise_aus_Königsberg
Niemand, Jesus Christus vielleicht ausgenommen, hat das Denken und die Wertvorstellungen der Deutschen nachhaltiger beeinflusst als Immanuel Kant: den "typisch deutschen" Hang zum Grübeln etwa oder das sprichwörtliche preußische Pflichtbewusstsein. Dabei war Kants Denken eher kosmopolitisch
- published: 17 Mar 2012
- views: 6142
- author: eDysfunktion
Immanuel Kant - Philosophy (ethics) Part:1
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 8:44
- Updated: 23 Sep 2012
Department of philosophy. Government College University. Made By: Mohsin Ahmed Khan
http://wn.com/Immanuel_Kant_Philosophy_ethics_Part1
Department of philosophy. Government College University. Made By: Mohsin Ahmed Khan
- published: 24 Jul 2010
- views: 3330
- author: mohsin9201867
Formalism: Immanuel Kant
- Order: Reorder
- Duration: 2:46
- Updated: 30 Dec 2012
A video by Dr. Bill Noonan for students at Columbia Gorge Community College
http://wn.com/Formalism_Immanuel_Kant
A video by Dr. Bill Noonan for students at Columbia Gorge Community College
- published: 14 Sep 2011
- views: 952
- author: cgcclive
3:32
Three Minute Philosophy - Immanuel Kant
No grey areas....
published: 11 Dec 2009
author: CollegeBinary
Three Minute Philosophy - Immanuel Kant
No grey areas.
- published: 11 Dec 2009
- views: 599936
- author: CollegeBinary
24:52
IMMANUEL KANT BY CHRISTOPHER INSOLE
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website fo...
published: 10 Mar 2012
author: StJohnsNottingham
IMMANUEL KANT BY CHRISTOPHER INSOLE
This is an extract from one of our timeline projects. Please visit our timeline website for more information and to access our online editions of our timelines.www.stjt.org.uk
- published: 10 Mar 2012
- views: 5874
- author: StJohnsNottingham
9:33
IMMANUEL KANT : CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
Webcast lecture on Kant's critique of pure reason produced for the history and context of ...
published: 08 Feb 2010
author: Winchesterjournalism
IMMANUEL KANT : CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON
Webcast lecture on Kant's critique of pure reason produced for the history and context of journalism course at the university of winchester in the UK. This video is the first ten minutes of a 40 minute discussion which continues at:"journalism.winchester.ac.uk
- published: 08 Feb 2010
- views: 43152
- author: Winchesterjournalism
19:33
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Metaphysics
www.philosophybites.com Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosoph...
published: 20 Aug 2011
author: pangeaprogressredux
Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) Metaphysics
www.philosophybites.com Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) is one of the most influential philosophers in the history of Western philosophy. His contributions to metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and aesthetics have had a profound impact on almost every philosophical movement that followed him. This article focuses on his metaphysics and epistemology in one of his most important works, The Critique of Pure Reason. A large part of Kant's work addresses the question "What can we know?" The answer, if it can be stated simply, is that our knowledge is constrained to mathematics and the science of the natural, empirical world. It is impossible, Kant argues, to extend knowledge to the supersensible realm of speculative metaphysics. The reason that knowledge has these constraints, Kant argues, is that the mind plays an active role in constituting the features of experience and limiting the mind's access only to the empirical realm of space and time. Kant responded to his predecessors by arguing against the Empiricists that the mind is not a blank slate that is written upon by the empirical world, and by rejecting the Rationalists' notion that pure, a priori knowledge of a mind-independent world was possible. Reason itself is structured with forms of experience and categories that give a phenomenal and logical structure to any possible object of empirical experience. These categories cannot be circumvented to get at a mind-independent world, but they are necessary for experience of ...
- published: 20 Aug 2011
- views: 12983
- author: pangeaprogressredux
9:19
IMMANUEL KANT ON MORALITY
A video about immanuel kant and morality. This is the first ten minutes of a 30 minute dis...
published: 11 Feb 2010
author: Winchesterjournalism
IMMANUEL KANT ON MORALITY
A video about immanuel kant and morality. This is the first ten minutes of a 30 minute discussion. The video continues at this URL: "journalism.winchester.ac.uk The discussion takes in Kant's ideas about the metaphysical basis of his system, including the centrality of the categorical imperative, and links to his system as a whole.
- published: 11 Feb 2010
- views: 20393
- author: Winchesterjournalism
9:23
2. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori...
published: 13 Feb 2010
author: drjasonjcampbell
2. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- published: 13 Feb 2010
- views: 7165
- author: drjasonjcampbell
8:21
1. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori...
published: 13 Feb 2010
author: drjasonjcampbell
1. David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
David Hume's Fork and Immanuel Kant's Synthetic A Priori
- published: 13 Feb 2010
- views: 14173
- author: drjasonjcampbell
7:43
Immanuel Kant: The Great Synthesizer
This clip describes Immanuel Kant's great synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist phil...
published: 19 May 2009
author: LennyBound
Immanuel Kant: The Great Synthesizer
This clip describes Immanuel Kant's great synthesis of the rationalist and empiricist philosophical traditions. Kant famously stated "Percepts without concepts are empty; concepts without percepts are blind." Kant argues that our experience of reality is not merely passive, but rather that the mind actively structures how we encounter the world. The clip then explains the difference between analytic/synthetic judgments and a priori/a posteriori judgments. It then closes with a brief description of Kant's deontological ethical theory, and his critique of metaphysics.
- published: 19 May 2009
- views: 43686
- author: LennyBound
2:51
Immanuel Kant - Top 10 Quotes
The ten best quotes by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (1724 - 1804) See all q...
published: 26 Sep 2011
author: iPerceptive
Immanuel Kant - Top 10 Quotes
The ten best quotes by the great German philosopher Immanuel Kant. (1724 - 1804) See all quotes by Immanuel Kant at www.iperceptive.com Enlighten yourself at www.iPerceptive.com Like iPerceptive at Facebook http Follow iPerceptive at Twitter twitter.com
- published: 26 Sep 2011
- views: 3529
- author: iPerceptive
14:10
Immanuel Kant - Critique of Judgement (Lecture) part 1/2
Professor Louis Markos giving a lecture on Kant's aesthetic system....
published: 19 Jul 2011
author: eddontheman
Immanuel Kant - Critique of Judgement (Lecture) part 1/2
Professor Louis Markos giving a lecture on Kant's aesthetic system.
- published: 19 Jul 2011
- views: 5959
- author: eddontheman
10:21
1. Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
www.jasonjcampbell.org...
published: 02 Dec 2010
author: drjasonjcampbell
1. Immanuel Kant Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics
www.jasonjcampbell.org
- published: 02 Dec 2010
- views: 5929
- author: drjasonjcampbell
4:14
Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment? (Summary)
Not my normal video, school project....
published: 10 Feb 2011
author: othershenanigans
Immanuel Kant: What is Enlightenment? (Summary)
Not my normal video, school project.
- published: 10 Feb 2011
- views: 5155
- author: othershenanigans
4:56
Immanuel Kant Song
"The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding" Translation by Roderi...
published: 19 May 2008
author: LennyBound
Immanuel Kant Song
"The Transcendental Deduction of the Pure Concepts of Understanding" Translation by Roderick T. Long Music and vocals by Paul L. Fine PLEASE NOTE: The audio for this video was NOT made by me. I merely found the song online and made the video. Also, I do not have piano tabs for the song. The song may be downloaded here: www.auburn.edu
- published: 19 May 2008
- views: 166969
- author: LennyBound
10:00
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I...
published: 21 Aug 2009
author: IMAGOEXISTENCIALISTA
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
La aventura del pensamiento Immanuel Kant, PARTE I
- published: 21 Aug 2009
- views: 89027
- author: IMAGOEXISTENCIALISTA
Vimeo results:
5:54
Therapy?—Crooked Timber
Music video for our song "Crooked Timber" from the same titled new album. Inspired by a qu...
published: 26 Mar 2009
author: Therapy?
Therapy?—Crooked Timber
Music video for our song "Crooked Timber" from the same titled new album. Inspired by a quote from 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant: "From the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."
4:37
Immanuel Kant
Schauspielhaus Zürich | Immanuel Kant von Thomas Bernhards | Inszenierung: Matthias Hartma...
published: 03 Jul 2012
author: scenofilm
Immanuel Kant
Schauspielhaus Zürich | Immanuel Kant von Thomas Bernhards | Inszenierung: Matthias Hartmann | Videotrailer by Mélanie Moser 2008
Youtube results:
24:31
Afl. 7 Durf te Denken - IMMANUEL KANT
Zie ook www.facebook.com of www.durftedenken.nl presentatie Farid Tabarki animaties: Sverr...
published: 17 Dec 2011
author: omroepHUMAN
Afl. 7 Durf te Denken - IMMANUEL KANT
Zie ook www.facebook.com of www.durftedenken.nl presentatie Farid Tabarki animaties: Sverre Fredriksen & Leander Huizinga sound design and music: Bailey Math & Michael Resnick research: Josephine Krikke, Anne-Greet van Rootselaer, Esther Wit regie film-item: Ayfer Ergün montage: Jan Willem Looze samenstelling en studio-regie: Eveline van Dijck IMMANUEL KANT (1724-1804) Aan Kant danken we het idee van de autonome mens; de mens die voor zichzelf denkt, en zich niet onmondig laat leiden door een ander. 'Sapere aude!' schrijft Kant in 1784. Ofwel: 'Durf te denken! Kant laat in zijn 'Kritiek van de zuivere rede' zien dat er een grens is aan wat we kunnen kennen. In die tijd deden filosofen uitspraken over het bestaan van God of de onsterfelijkheid van de ziel, maar volgens Kant is dat louter speculatie. In de beroemde categorisch imperatief geeft Kant een criterium: handel volgens dat principe waarvan je zou willen dat het een algemene wet wordt. Een autonoom mens weet dat hij niet egoïstisch zijn gang kan gaan. Als immers iedereen dat zou doen, gaat het ten koste van ieders vrijheid. De mens is onderhevig aan natuurwetten, en tegelijkertijd -- als moreel wezen -- autonoom. Gastspreker in deze aflevering is filosoof Ad Verbrugge. Politie Groningen Ayfer Ergün maakte een reportage over de relatie tussen Kant en de politie. De prestaties van de Nederlandse politie worden de laatste jaren vooral in cijfers uitgedrukt. Maar politiewerk is mensenwerk dat niet volledig in cijfers te ...
- published: 17 Dec 2011
- views: 3736
- author: omroepHUMAN
54:38
Verstehen Sie Kant?
Aus der Reihe "Sternstunde Philosophie" - Was kann ich wissen? - Was soll ich tun? - Was d...
published: 27 Dec 2011
author: Martin Mützenberg
Verstehen Sie Kant?
Aus der Reihe "Sternstunde Philosophie" - Was kann ich wissen? - Was soll ich tun? - Was darf ich hoffen?
- published: 27 Dec 2011
- views: 1590
- author: Martin Mützenberg
19:45
Immanuel Kant
Kant é famoso sobretudo pela elaboração do denominado idealismo transcendental: todos nós ...
published: 11 Oct 2011
author: Faccenter Pires
Immanuel Kant
Kant é famoso sobretudo pela elaboração do denominado idealismo transcendental: todos nós trazemos formas e conceitos a priori (aqueles que não vêm da experiência) para a experiência concreta do mundo, os quais seriam de outra forma impossíveis de determinar. A filosofia da natureza e da natureza humana de Kant é historicamente uma das mais determinantes fontes do relativismo conceptual que dominou a vida intelectual do século XX. No entanto, é muito provável que Kant rejeitasse o relativismo nas formas contemporâneas, como por exemplo o Pós-modernismo. Kant é também conhecido pela filosofia moral e pela proposta, a primeira moderna, de uma teoria da formação do sistema solar, conhecida como a hipótese Kant-Laplace.
- published: 11 Oct 2011
- views: 19995
- author: Faccenter Pires
5:57
Immanuel Kant on Education, Clip 1
Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College and CEE's Executive Directo...
published: 12 Apr 2010
author: CEEChannel
Immanuel Kant on Education, Clip 1
Dr. Stephen Hicks, Professor of Philosophy at Rockford College and CEE's Executive Director, presents a series of lectures on the philosophy of education. In Part 7, Dr. Hicks covers the first of the seven "isms" — Idealism. In this section, he discusses the 18th-century German philosopher Immanuel Kant's views on education.
- published: 12 Apr 2010
- views: 1650
- author: CEEChannel
photo: AP / Photo
22 Feb 2013
MALINDI, Kenya — In a room by the stairs, Shukrani Malingi, a Pokomo farmer, writhed on a metal cot, the skin on his back burned off. Down the hall, at a safe distance, Rahema Hageyo, an Orma girl, stared blankly out of a window, a long scar above her thimble-like neck. She was nearly decapitated by a machete chop — and she is only 9 months old. Connect With Us on Twitter ... Twitter List. Reporters and Editors ... ... Op-Ed ... N.Y ... ....(size: 6.3Kb)
photo: AP
22 Feb 2013
Oscar Pistorius appears at the Magistrate Court in Pretoria on day four of his bail hearing. Photo. AFP. The lead lawyer prosecuting Oscar Pistorius on murder charges has told a Pretoria bail hearing the sprinter knows a long spell in jail is ‘‘almost guaranteed’’ and is a flight risk ... ‘‘He must realise that a long term of imprisonment is almost guaranteed ... AFP/AAP. ....(size: 3.0Kb)
photo: AP / Aijaz Rahi
22 Feb 2013
Indian Mujahideen group reported to have ties to Pakistan and may be behind dual bomb attack that killed 15. Officials look for evidence in the debris of one of the two bomb blast sites in Hyderabad, India. Photograph. Aijaz Rahi/AP ... India's recent execution of an Islamic militant is being examined as a possible motive for the bombings, he said ... They had also visited various spots in New Delhi, Mumbai and Pune ... ....(size: 4.8Kb)
photo: Creative Commons / Strike Eagle
22 Feb 2013
HYDERABAD. A trip to purchase books for the exam of sub-inspector in excise department proved to be the last outing of Vijay Kumar, who was among the five students killed in the twin blasts in the city. Among the other students killed was Rajasekhar, who was pursuing MBA, Harish, an engineering student from Kottapet locality in the city, and Swapna, another MBA student ... ....(size: 2.0Kb)
photo: UN / UNICEF, Marco Domino
22 Feb 2013
The United Nations has said it will not pay hundreds of millions of dollars in compensation claimed by cholera victims in impoverished Haiti, where an epidemic has killed thousands of people and been blamed on UN peacekeepers. Cholera - an infection causing severe diarrhoea that can lead to dehydration and death - has killed some 7,750 Haitians and sickened almost 620,000 since October 2010. It occurs in places with poor sanitation ... ....(size: 3.4Kb)
Huffington Post
22 Feb 2013
Get Back. On Course. Download. GPS for. the Soul. The stress and strain of constantly being connected can sometimes take your life -- and your well-being -- off course. GPS For The Soul can help you find your way back to balance ... In her GPS Guide below, Luminita Daniela Saviuc shares 12 empowering messages that you deserve to affirm ... We can judge the heart of a man by his treatment of animals." - Immanuel Kant Be Good To Your Body ... Like....(size: 5.0Kb)
The Independent
22 Feb 2013
The only German philosophy professor who actively resisted the Nazis is nowadays virtually unknown. Though one or two scholarly monographs have appeared on him, Kurt Huber will not be found on any university syllabus ... As Sherratt notes, it was Immanuel Kant who wrote that "the Jewish religion is not really a religion at all" and described Jews as "a nation of cheats" ... on progress and other modern myths' (Allen Lane)....(size: 6.0Kb)
noodls
22 Feb 2013
... the inclusion of the area into the regional network of water touring, the organization of a youth camp called "Baltic Artek", the promotion of the mechanism of a public-private partnership, the creation of the European Law Institute on the basis of Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University in Kaliningrad have already been selected for implementation....(size: 6.2Kb)
noodls
19 Feb 2013
(Source. Washington University in Saint Louis) Great literature speaks to us across the years and miles ... Marcus Aurelius, William Blake, Walter Benjamin, Immanuel Kant-all jostle at the table with the likes of Joseph Brodsky, Jim Jarmusch, Milan Kundera and Johnny Depp. At 8 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 21, Graber will read from her work for The Writing Program in Arts & Sciences ... A reception and book signing will immediately follow ... One man prays....(size: 2.4Kb)
Business Day
13 Feb 2013
What all this does is invite, however briefly, a consideration of the kind of approach that might have been adopted by the noted 18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant ... According to Kant, correct political thinking begins with two propositions — first, the freedom of each member of society; second, the equality each must enjoy with others as a subject....(size: 6.0Kb)
Chicago Tribune
12 Feb 2013
The first person to formally define "races" was the noted philosopher Immanuel Kant, who in 1785 classified people into four fixed races, which were arrayed in a hierarchy according to color and talent. Kant had scant personal knowledge of human diversity but opined freely about the tastes and finer feelings of groups about which he knew nothing....(size: 6.3Kb)
Huffington Post
12 Feb 2013
I wasn't surprised when the World Economic Forum (WEF) posed the following question on Twitter.. @Davos. "How can we make capitalism more moral?". After all, WEF itself has become "more moral" over time ... Over the past few years, WEF has tackled increasingly broad notions of business' role in society, including how business can operate more responsibly ... "Start by not implying it's immoral but rather [in practice] amoral ... 1 ... 2 ... -Immanuel Kant....(size: 14.2Kb)
The New York Times
11 Feb 2013
Africa, Discrimination, Europe, Hume, David, Kant, Immanuel, Philosophy, Race and Ethnicity, Slavery ... Another two decades on, Immanuel Kant, considered by many to be the greatest philosopher of the modern period, would manage to let slip what is surely the greatest non-sequitur in the history of philosophy ... Africa, Discrimination, Europe, Hume, David, Kant, Immanuel, Philosophy, Race and Ethnicity, Slavery....(size: 22.3Kb)
WorldNetDaily
09 Feb 2013
Note that this essay on epistemology and political philosophy is demonstrative of the world’s collective delusion in embracing several perverse Weltanschauung (worldviews) beginning with the secular humanism of the Enlightenment Age (1600s–1700s) promoted by philosophers like Voltaire, Kant, D ‘Alembert, Diderot, Rousseau, Hume and Berkeley ... Immanuel Kant (1724-1804) was an 18th century German philosopher....(size: 8.1Kb)
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
08 Feb 2013
According to ESPN, more than 108 million people watched Super Bowl XLVII. That's about a third of the U.S. population. But I know two people who didn't watch the game ... That includes the brain ... So my friends -- longtime fans -- gave up the game ... No, my friends are following the central moral principle of philosopher Immanuel Kant, the idea (in my lay understanding) that you should act only as you would wish everyone to act ... John M....(size: 3.4Kb)
Asia Times
08 Feb 2013
The Philosophy of Hebrew Scripture by Ora Harmony. . Reviewed by Friedrich Hansen ... But. ... So much so that the philosopher Immanuel Kant did not even acknowledge ancient Judaism as a religion ... Thus, the history of Western thought was rewritten with Kant and Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel gazing though a Greek lens, with a rich Jewish tradition marginalized as superstitious and rendered as utterly worthless ... The author concludes....(size: 16.3Kb)
noodls
07 Feb 2013
(Source. Eastern Kentucky University) ... Dr ... 21 ... It continued to have scientific, economic and political implications for a hundred years, and also began to work its way into the literature of the day, with folks like Benjamin Franklin, Henry David Thoreau, Washington Irving, Immanuel Kant, John Keats and Lord Byron entering the fray. Eventually the degeneracy argument died, but it did not die an easy death." ... Contact Information. Dr....(size: 4.1Kb)
noodls
05 Feb 2013
(Source. University of Windsor) ... "There are a lot of close relationships between faculty and their more junior colleagues ... One of the department's more attractive features, she said, was its willingness to allow her to focus her studies on the work of hooks, despite the fact that she may not be considered in the same league as such traditionally studied philosophers as David Hume or Immanuel Kant ... - Published on Feb 05, 2013 ... (noodl....(size: 3.7Kb)
"Kant" redirects here. For other uses, see Kant (disambiguation).
See also: Kant (surname)
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Immanuel Kant (German pronunciation: [ɪˈmaːnu̯eːl ˈkant]; 22 April 1724 – 12 February 1804) was a German philosopher from Königsberg (today Kaliningrad of Russia), who researched, lectured, and wrote on philosophy and anthropology during the Enlightenment at the end of the 18th century.[1] At the time, there were major successes and advances in the sciences (for example, Isaac Newton, Carl Friedrich Gauss, and Robert Boyle) applying reason and logic.
Kant’s major work, the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft, 1781),[2] aimed to unite reason with experience to move beyond what he took to be failures of traditional philosophy and metaphysics. He hoped to end an age of speculation where objects outside experience were used to support what he saw as futile theories, while opposing the skepticism of thinkers such as Descartes, Berkeley and Hume.
He stated:
"It always remains a scandal of philosophy and universal human reason that the existence of things outside us ... should have to be assumed merely on faith, and that if it occurs to anyone to doubt it, we should be unable to answer him with a satisfactory proof."[3]
Kant proposed a ‘Copernican Revolution’ in reverse, saying that:
"Up to now it has been assumed that all our cognition must conform to the objects; but ... let us once try whether we do not get farther with the problems of metaphysics by assuming that the objects must conform to our cognition."[4]
Kant published other important works on ethics, religion, law, aesthetics, astronomy, and history. These included the Critique of Practical Reason (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft, 1788) and the Metaphysics of Morals (Die Metaphysik der Sitten, 1797), which dealt with ethics. And the Critique of Judgment (Kritik der Urteilskraft, 1790), which looks at aesthetics and teleology. He aimed to resolve disputes between empirical and rationalist approaches. The former asserted that all knowledge comes through experience; the latter maintained that reason and innate ideas were prior. Kant argued that experience is purely subjective without first being processed by pure reason. He also said that using reason without applying it to experience only leads to theoretical illusions. The free and proper exercise of reason by the individual was both a theme of the Enlightenment, and of Kant's approaches to the various problems of philosophy.
His ideas influenced many thinkers in Germany during his lifetime. He settled and moved philosophy beyond the debate between the rationalists and empiricists. The philosophers Fichte, Schelling, Hegel and Schopenhauer amended and developed the Kantian system, thus bringing about various forms of German idealism. He is seen as a major figure in the history and development of philosophy. German and European thinking progressed after his time, and his influence still inspires philosophical work today.[5]
Contents |
Biography[link]
Immanuel Kant was born in 1724 in Königsberg, the capital of Prussia at that time, today the city of Kaliningrad in the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad Oblast. He was the fourth of nine children (four of them reached adulthood). Baptized 'Emanuel', he changed his name to 'Immanuel'[6] after learning Hebrew. In his entire life, he never traveled more than ten miles from Königsberg.[7] His father, Johann Georg Kant (1682–1746), was a German harnessmaker from Memel, at the time Prussia's most northeastern city (now Klaipėda, Lithuania). His mother, Regina Dorothea Reuter (1697–1737), was born in Nuremberg.[8] Kant's paternal grandfather had emigrated from Scotland to East Prussia, and his father still spelled their family name "Cant".[9] In his youth, Kant was a solid, albeit unspectacular, student. He was brought up in a Pietist household that stressed intense religious devotion, personal humility, and a literal interpretation of the Bible. Consequently, Kant received a stern education – strict, punitive, and disciplinary – that preferred Latin and religious instruction over mathematics and science.[10] The common myths concerning Kant's personal mannerisms are enumerated, explained, and refuted in Goldthwait's introduction to his translation of Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime.[11] It is often held that Kant lived a very strict and predictable life, leading to the oft-repeated story that neighbors would set their clocks by his daily walks. He never married, but did not seem to lack a rewarding social life - he was a popular teacher and a modestly successful author even before starting on his major philosophical works.
The young scholar[link]
Kant showed a great aptitude to study at an early age. He was first sent to Collegium Fredericianum and then enrolled at the University of Königsberg (where he would spend his entire career) in 1740, at the age of 16.[12] He studied the philosophy of Leibniz and Wolff under Martin Knutzen, a rationalist who was also familiar with developments in British philosophy and science and who introduced Kant to the new mathematical physics of Newton. Knutzen dissuaded Kant from the theory of pre-established harmony, which he regarded as "the pillow for the lazy mind". He also dissuaded the young scholar from idealism, which was negatively regarded by most philosophers in the 18th century. (The theory of transcendental idealism that Kant developed in the Critique of Pure Reason is not traditional idealism, i.e. the idea that reality is purely mental. In fact, Kant produced arguments against traditional idealism in the second part of the Critique of Pure Reason.) His father's stroke and subsequent death in 1746 interrupted his studies. Kant became a private tutor in the smaller towns surrounding Königsberg, but continued his scholarly research. 1747 saw the publication of his first philosophical work, Thoughts on the True Estimation of Living Forces.
Early work[link]
Kant is best known for his transcendental idealist philosophy that time and space are not materially real but merely the ideal a priori condition of our internal intuition. But he worked in other areas as well. He made an important astronomical discovery, namely a discovery about the nature of the Earth's rotation, for which he won the Berlin Academy Prize in 1754. Even more importantly, from this Kant concluded that time is not a thing in itself determined from experience, objects, motion, and change, but rather an unavoidable framework of the human mind that preconditions possible experience.[citation needed]
According to Lord Kelvin:
"Kant pointed out in the middle of last century, what had not previously been discovered by mathematicians or physical astronomers, that the frictional resistance against tidal currents on the earth's surface must cause a diminution of the earth's rotational speed. This immense discovery in Natural Philosophy seems to have attracted little attention,--indeed to have passed quite unnoticed, --among mathematicians, and astronomers, and naturalists, until about 1840, when the doctrine of energy began to be taken to heart."
—Lord Kelvin, physicist, 1897
According to Thomas Huxley:
"The sort of geological speculation to which I am now referring (geological aetiology, in short) was created as a science by that famous philosopher, Immanuel Kant, when, in 1775, he wrote his General Natural History and Theory of the Celestial Bodies; or, an Attempt to Account for the Constitutional and Mechanical Origin of the Universe, upon Newtonian Principles." --
—Thomas H. Huxley, 1869
In the General History of Nature and Theory of the Heavens (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels) (1755), Kant laid out the Nebular hypothesis, in which he deduced that the Solar System formed from a large cloud of gas, a nebula. He thus attempted to explain the order of the solar system, seen previously by Newton as being imposed from the beginning by God. Kant also correctly deduced that the Milky Way was a large disk of stars, which he theorized also formed from a (much larger) spinning cloud of gas. He further suggested the possibility that other nebulae might also be similarly large and distant disks of stars. These postulations opened new horizons for astronomy: for the first time extending astronomy beyond the solar system to galactic and extragalactic realms.[13]
From this point on, Kant turned increasingly to philosophical issues, although he continued to write on the sciences throughout his life. In the early 1760s, Kant produced a series of important works in philosophy. The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures, a work in logic, was published in 1762. Two more works appeared the following year: Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy and The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God. In 1764, Kant wrote Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime and then was second to Moses Mendelssohn in a Berlin Academy prize competition with his Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (often referred to as "The Prize Essay"). In 1770, at the age of 45, Kant was finally appointed Professor of Logic and Metaphysics at the University of Königsberg. Kant wrote his inaugural dissertation in defence of this appointment. This work saw the emergence of several central themes of his mature work, including the distinction between the faculties of intellectual thought and sensible receptivity. Not to observe this distinction would mean to commit the error of subreption, and, as he says in the last chapter of the dissertation, only in avoidance of this error does metaphysics flourish.
The issue that vexed Kant was central to what twentieth century scholars termed "the philosophy of mind." The flowering of the natural sciences had led to an understanding of how data reaches the brain. Sunlight may fall upon a distant object, whereupon light is reflected from various parts of the object in a way that maps the surface features (color, texture, etc.) of the object. The light reaches the eye of a human observer, passes through the cornea, is focused by the lens upon the retina where it forms an image similar to that formed by light passing through a pinhole into a camera obscura. The retinal cells next send impulses through the optic nerve and thereafter they form a mapping in the brain of the visual features of the distant object. The interior mapping is not the exterior thing being mapped, and our belief that there is a meaningful relationship between the exterior object and the mapping in the brain depends on a chain of reasoning that is not fully grounded. But the uncertainty aroused by these considerations, the uncertainties raised by optical illusions, misperceptions, delusions, etc., are not the end of the problems.
Kant saw that the mind could not function as an empty container that simply receives data from the outside. Something must be giving order to the incoming data. Images of external objects must be kept in the same sequence in which they were received. This ordering occurs through the mind's intuition of time. The same considerations apply to the mind's function of constituting space for ordering mappings of visual and tactile signals arriving via the already described chains of physical causation.
It is often held that Kant was a late developer, that he only became an important philosopher in his mid-50s after rejecting his earlier views. While it is true that Kant wrote his greatest works relatively late in life, there is a tendency to underestimate the value of his earlier works. Recent Kant scholarship has devoted more attention to these "pre-critical" writings and has recognized a degree of continuity with his mature work.[14]
The silent decade[link]
At the age of 46, Kant was an established scholar and an increasingly influential philosopher. Much was expected of him. In correspondence with his ex-student and friend Markus Herz, Kant admitted that, in the Inaugural Dissertation, he had failed to account for the relation and connection between our sensible and intellectual faculties—he needed to explain how we combine sensory knowledge with reasoned knowledge, these being related but very different processes. He also credited David Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumber" (circa 1771).[15] Hume had stated that experience consists only of sequences of feelings, images or sounds. Ideas such as 'cause', goodness, or objects were not evident in experience, so why do we believe in the reality of these? Kant felt that reason could remove this skepticism, and he set himself to solving these problems. He did not publish any work in philosophy for the next eleven years.
File:Immanuel Kant 3.jpg
Immanuel Kant
Although fond of company and conversation with others, Kant isolated himself. He resisted friends' attempts to bring him out of his isolation. In 1778, in response to one of these offers by a former pupil, Kant wrote:
"Any change makes me apprehensive, even if it offers the greatest promise of improving my condition, and I am persuaded by this natural instinct of mine that I must take heed if I wish that the threads which the Fates spin so thin and weak in my case to be spun to any length. My great thanks, to my well-wishers and friends, who think so kindly of me as to undertake my welfare, but at the same time a most humble request to protect me in my current condition from any disturbance."[16]
When Kant emerged from his silence in 1781, the result was the Critique of Pure Reason. Although now uniformly recognized as one of the greatest works in the history of philosophy, this Critique was largely ignored upon its initial publication. The book was long, over 800 pages in the original German edition, and written in what some considered a convoluted style. It received few reviews, and these granted no significance to the work. Its density made it, as Johann Gottfried Herder put it in a letter to Johann Georg Hamann, a "tough nut to crack," obscured by "all this heavy gossamer".[17] Its reception stood in stark contrast to the praise Kant received for earlier works, such as his Prize Essay and shorter works that preceded the first Critique. These well-received and readable tracts include one on the earthquake in Lisbon that was so popular that it was sold by the page.[18] Prior to the change in course documented in the first Critique, his books sold well, and by the time he published Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime in 1764 he had become a popular author of some note.[19] Kant was disappointed with the first Critique's reception. Recognizing the need to clarify the original treatise, Kant wrote the Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics in 1783 as a summary of its main views. He also encouraged his friend, Johann Schultz, to publish a brief commentary on the Critique of Pure Reason.
Kant's reputation gradually rose through the 1780s, sparked by a series of important works: the 1784 essay, "Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment?"; 1785's Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (his first work on moral philosophy); and, from 1786, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science. But Kant's fame ultimately arrived from an unexpected source. In 1786, Karl Reinhold began to publish a series of public letters on the Kantian philosophy. In these letters, Reinhold framed Kant's philosophy as a response to the central intellectual controversy of the era: the Pantheism Dispute. Friedrich Jacobi had accused the recently deceased G. E. Lessing (a distinguished dramatist and philosophical essayist) of Spinozism. Such a charge, tantamount to atheism, was vigorously denied by Lessing's friend Moses Mendelssohn, and a bitter public dispute arose among partisans. The controversy gradually escalated into a general debate over the values of the Enlightenment and the value of reason itself. Reinhold maintained in his letters that Kant's Critique of Pure Reason could settle this dispute by defending the authority and bounds of reason. Reinhold's letters were widely read and made Kant the most famous philosopher of his era.
Mature work[link]
Kant published a second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (Kritik der reinen Vernunft) in 1787, heavily revising the first parts of the book. Most of his subsequent work focused on other areas of philosophy. He continued to develop his moral philosophy, notably in 1788's Critique of Practical Reason (known as the second Critique) and 1797’s Metaphysics of Morals. The 1790 Critique of Judgment (the third Critique) applied the Kantian system to aesthetics and teleology.
In 1792, Kant's attempt to publish the Second of the four Pieces of Religion within the Bounds of Bare Reason, in the journal Berlinische Monatsschrift, met with opposition from the King's censorship commission, which had been established that same year in the context of 1789 French Revolution.[20] Kant then arranged to have all four pieces published as a book, routing it through the philosophy department at the University of Jena to avoid the need for theological censorship.[citation needed] Kant got a now famous reprimand from the King,[20] for this action of insubordination. When he nevertheless published a second edition in 1794, the censor was so irate that he arranged for a royal order that required Kant never to publish or even speak publicly about religion.[citation needed] Kant then published his response to the King's reprimand and explained himself, in the preface of The Conflict of the Faculties.[20]
He also wrote a number of semi-popular essays on history, religion, politics and other topics. These works were well received by Kant's contemporaries and confirmed his preeminent status in eighteenth century philosophy. There were several journals devoted solely to defending and criticizing the Kantian philosophy. But despite his success, philosophical trends were moving in another direction. Many of Kant's most important disciples (including Reinhold, Beck and Fichte) transformed the Kantian position into increasingly radical forms of idealism. The progressive stages of revision of Kant's teachings marked the emergence of German Idealism. Kant opposed these developments and publicly denounced Fichte in an open letter in 1799.[21] It was one of his final acts expounding a stance on philosophical questions. In 1800, a student of Kant, Gottlob Benjamin Jäsche, published a manual of logic for teachers called Logik, which he had prepared at Kant's request. Jäsche prepared the Logik using a copy of a textbook in logic by Georg Freidrich Meier entitled Auszug aus der Vernunftlehre, in which Kant had written copious notes and annotations. The Logik has been considered of fundamental importance to Kant's philosophy, and the understanding of it. The great nineteenth century logician Charles Sanders Peirce remarked, in an incomplete review of Thomas Kingsmill Abbott's English translation of the introduction to the Logik, that "Kant's whole philosophy turns upon his logic."[22] Also, Robert Schirokauer Hartman and Wolfgang Schwarz, wrote in the translators' introduction to their English translation of the Logik, "Its importance lies not only in its significance for the Critique of Pure Reason, the second part of which is a restatement of fundamental tenets of the Logic, but in its position within the whole of Kant's work."[23] Kant's health, long poor, took a turn for the worse and he died at Königsberg on 12 February 1804, uttering "Genug" ("Enough") before expiring.[24] His unfinished final work, the fragmentary Opus Postumum, was, as its title suggests, published posthumously.
Philosophy[link]
In Kant's essay "Answering the Question: What is Enlightenment?", Kant defined the Enlightenment as an age shaped by the Latin motto Sapere aude ("Dare to Know"). Kant maintained that one ought to think autonomously, free of the dictates of external authority. His work reconciled many of the differences between the rationalist and empiricist traditions of the 18th century. He had a decisive impact on the Romantic and German Idealist philosophies of the 19th century. His work has also been a starting point for many 20th century philosophers.
Kant asserted that, because of the limitations of argumentation in the absence of irrefutable evidence, no one could really know whether there is a God and an afterlife or not. For the sake of morality and as a ground for reason, Kant asserted, people are justified in believing in God, even though they could never know God's presence empirically. He explained:
All the preparations of reason, therefore, in what may be called pure philosophy, are in reality directed to those three problems only [God, the soul, and freedom]. However, these three elements in themselves still hold independent, proportional, objective weight individually. Moreover, in a collective relational context; namely, to know what ought to be done: if the will is free, if there is a God, and if there is a future world. As this concerns our actions with reference to the highest aims of life, we see that the ultimate intention of nature in her wise provision was really, in the constitution of our reason, directed to moral interests only.[25]
The sense of an enlightened approach and the critical method required that "If one cannot prove that a thing is, he may try to prove that it is not. And if he succeeds in doing neither (as often occurs), he may still ask whether it is in his interest to accept one or the other of the alternatives hypothetically, from the theoretical or the practical point of view. Hence the question no longer is as to whether perpetual peace is a real thing or not a real thing, or as to whether we may not be deceiving ourselves when we adopt the former alternative, but we must act on the supposition of its being real."[26] The presupposition of God, soul, and freedom was then a practical concern, for "Morality, by itself, constitutes a system, but happiness does not, unless it is distributed in exact proportion to morality. This, however, is possible in an intelligible world only under a wise author and ruler. Reason compels us to admit such a ruler, together with life in such a world, which we must consider as future life, or else all moral laws are to be considered as idle dreams... ."[27]
Kant claimed to have created a "Copernican revolution" in philosophy. This involved two interconnected foundations of his "critical philosophy":
- the epistemology of Transcendental Idealism and
- the moral philosophy of the autonomy of practical reason.
These teachings placed the active, rational human subject at the center of the cognitive and moral worlds. Kant argued that the rational order of the world as known by science was not just the fortuitous accumulation of sense perceptions.
Conceptual unification and integration is carried out by the mind through concepts or the "categories of the understanding" operating on the perceptual manifold within space and time. The latter are not concepts,[28] but are forms of sensibility that are a priori necessary conditions for any possible experience. Thus the objective order of nature and the causal necessity that operates within it are dependent upon the mind's processes, the product of the rule-based activity that Kant called, "synthesis. There is much discussion among Kant scholars on the correct interpretation of this train of thought.
The 'two-world' interpretation regards Kant's position as a statement of epistemological limitation, that we are not able to transcend the bounds of our own mind, meaning that we cannot access the "thing-in-itself". Kant, however, also speaks of the thing in itself or transcendental object as a product of the (human) understanding as it attempts to conceive of objects in abstraction from the conditions of sensibility. Following this line of thought, some interpreters have argued that the thing in itself does not represent a separate ontological domain but simply a way of considering objects by means of the understanding alone – this is known as the two-aspect view.
The notion of the "thing in itself" was much discussed by those who came after Kant. It was argued that since the "thing in itself" was unknowable its existence could not simply be assumed. Rather than arbitrarily switching to an account that was ungrounded in anything supposed to be the "real," as did the German Idealists, another group arose to ask how our (presumably reliable) accounts of a coherent and rule-abiding universe were actually grounded. This new kind of philosophy became known as Phenomenology, and its founder was Edmund Husserl.
With regard to morality, Kant argued that the source of the good lies not in anything outside the human subject, either in nature or given by God, but rather is only the good will itself. A good will is one that acts from duty in accordance with the universal moral law that the autonomous human being freely gives itself. This law obliges one to treat humanity – understood as rational agency, and represented through oneself as well as others – as an end in itself rather than (merely) as means to other ends the individual might hold. This necessitates practical self-reflection in which we universalize our reasons.
These ideas have largely framed or influenced all subsequent philosophical discussion and analysis. The specifics of Kant's account generated immediate and lasting controversy. Nevertheless, his theses – that the mind itself necessarily makes a constitutive contribution to its knowledge, that this contribution is transcendental rather than psychological, that philosophy involves self-critical activity, that morality is rooted in human freedom, and that to act autonomously is to act according to rational moral principles – have all had a lasting effect on subsequent philosophy.
Theory of perception[link]
Main article: The Critique of Pure Reason
Kant defines his theory of perception in his influential 1781 work The Critique of Pure Reason, which has often been cited as the most significant volume of metaphysics and epistemology in modern philosophy. Kant maintains that our understanding of the external world had its foundations not merely in experience, but in both experience and a priori concepts, thus offering a non-empiricist critique of rationalist philosophy, which is what he and others referred to as his "Copernican revolution".[29]
Firstly, Kant's distinction between analytic and synthetic propositions:
- Analytic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is contained in its subject concept; e.g., "All bachelors are unmarried," or, "All bodies take up space."
- Synthetic proposition: a proposition whose predicate concept is not contained in its subject concept ; e.g., "All bachelors are happy," or, "All bodies have weight."
Analytic propositions are true by nature of the meaning of the words involved in the sentence—we require no further knowledge than a grasp of the language to understand this proposition. On the other hand, synthetic statements are those that tell us something about the world. The truth or falsehood of synthetic statements derives from something outside of their linguistic content. In this instance, weight is not a necessary predicate of the body; until we are told the heaviness of the body we do not know that it has weight. In this case, experience of the body is required before its heaviness becomes clear. Before Kant's first Critique, empiricists (cf. Hume) and rationalists (cf. Leibniz) assumed that all synthetic statements required experience to be known.
Kant, however, contests this: he claims that elementary mathematics, like arithmetic, is synthetic a priori, in that its statements provide new knowledge, but knowledge that is not derived from experience. This becomes part of his over-all argument for transcendental idealism. That is, he argues that the possibility of experience depends on certain necessary conditions—which he calls a priori forms—and that these conditions structure and hold true of the world of experience. In so doing, his main claims in the "Transcendental Aesthetic" are that mathematic judgments are synthetic a priori and in addition, that Space and Time are not derived from experience but rather are its preconditions.
Once we have grasped the concepts of addition, subtraction or the functions of basic arithmetic, we do not need any empirical experience to know that 100 + 100 = 200, and in this way it would appear that arithmetic is in fact analytic. However, that it is analytic can be disproved thus: if the numbers five and seven in the calculation 5 + 7 = 12 are examined, there is nothing to be found in them by which the number 12 can be inferred. Such it is that "5 + 7" and "the cube root of 1,728" or "12" are not analytic because their reference is the same but their sense is not—that the mathematic judgment "5 + 7 = 12" tells us something new about the world. It is self-evident, and undeniably a priori, but at the same time it is synthetic. And so Kant proves a proposition can be synthetic and known a priori.
Kant asserts that experience is based both upon the perception of external objects and a priori knowledge.[30] The external world, he writes, provides those things that we sense. It is our mind, though, that processes this information about the world and gives it order, allowing us to comprehend it. Our mind supplies the conditions of space and time to experience objects. According to the "transcendental unity of apperception", the concepts of the mind (Understanding) and the perceptions or intuitions that garner information from phenomena (Sensibility) are synthesized by comprehension. Without the concepts, intuitions are nondescript; without the intuitions, concepts are meaningless—thus the famous statement, "Thoughts without content are empty, intuitions without concepts are blind."[31]
Categories of the Faculty of Understanding[link]
See also: Category (Kant)
In studying the work of Kant one must realize that there is a distinction between "understanding" as the general concept (in German, das Verstehen) and the "understanding" as a faculty of the human mind (in German, der Verstand, "the intellect"). In much English language scholarship, the word "understanding" is used in both senses.
Kant deemed it obvious that we have some objective knowledge of the world, such as, say, Newtonian physics. But this knowledge relies on synthetic, a priori laws of nature, like causality and substance. The problem, then, is how this is possible. Kant’s solution was to reason that the subject must supply laws that make experience of objects possible, and that these laws are the synthetic, a priori laws of nature that we know apply to all objects before we experience them. So, to deduce all these laws, Kant examined experience in general, dissecting in it what is supplied by the mind from what is supplied by the given intuitions. What has just been explicated is commonly called a transcendental reduction.[32]
To begin with, Kant’s distinction between the a posteriori being contingent and particular knowledge, and the a priori being universal and necessary knowledge, must be kept in mind. For if we merely connect two intuitions together in a perceiving subject, the knowledgeis always subjective because it is derived a posteriori, when what is desired is for the knowledge to be objective, that is, for the two intuitions to refer to the object and hold good of it necessarily universally for anyone at anytime, not just the perceiving subject in its current condition. What else is equivalent to objective knowledge besides the a priori, that is to say, universal and necessary knowledge? Nothing else, and hence before knowledge can be objective, it must be incorporated under an a priori category of the understanding.[32][33]
For example, say a subject says, “The sun shines on the stone; the stone grows warm,” which is all he perceives in perception. His judgment is contingent and holds no necessity. But if he says, “The sunshine causes the stone to warm,” he subsumes the perception under the category of causality, which is not found in the perception, and necessarily synthesizes the concept sunshine with the concept heat, producing a necessarily universally true judgment.[32]
To explain the categories in more detail, they are the preconditions of the construction of objects in the mind. Indeed, to even think of the sun and stone presupposes the category of subsistence, that is, substance. For the categories synthesize the random data of the sensory manifold into intelligible objects. This means that the categories are also the most abstract things one can say of any object whatsoever, and hence one can have an a priori cognition of the totality of all objects of experience if one can list all of them. To do so, Kant formulates another transcendental deduction.[32]
Judgments are, for Kant, the preconditions of any thought. Man thinks via judgments, so all possible judgments must be listed and the perceptions connected within them put aside, so as to make it possible to examine the moments when the understanding is engaged in constructing judgments. For the categories are equivalent to these moments, in that they are concepts of intuitions in general, so far as they are determined by these moments universally and necessarily. Thus by listing all the moments, one can deduce from them all of the categories.[32]
One may now ask: How many possible judgments are there? Kant believed that all the possible propositions within Aristotle’s syllogistic logic are equivalent to all possible judgments, and that all the logical operators within the propositions are equivalent to the moments of the understanding within judgments. Thus he listed Aristotle’s system in four groups of three: quantity (universal, particular, singular), quality (affirmative, negative, infinite), relation (categorical, hypothetical, disjunctive) and modality (problematic, assertoric, apodeictic). The parallelism with Kant’s categories is obvious: quantity (unity, plurality, totality), quality (reality, negation, limitation), relation (substance, cause, community) and modality (possibility, existence, necessity).[32]
The fundamental building blocks of experience, i.e. objective knowledge, are now in place. First there is the sensibility, which supplies the mind with intuitions, and then there is the understanding, which produces judgments of these intuitions and can subsume them under categories. These categories lift the intuitions up out of the subject’s current state of consciousness and place them within consciousness in general, producing universally necessary knowledge. For the categories are innate in any rational being, so any intuition thought within a category in one mind is necessarily subsumed and understood identically in any mind. In other words we filter what we see and hear.[32]
Schema[link]
See also: Schema (Kant)
Kant ran into a problem with his theory that the mind plays a part in producing objective knowledge. Intuitions and categories are entirely disparate, so how can they interact? Kant’s solution is the schema: a priori principles by which the transcendental imagination connects concepts with intuitions through time. All the principles are temporally bound, for if a concept is purely a priori, as the categories are, then they must apply for all times. Hence there are principles such as substance is that which endures through time, and the cause must always be prior to the effect.[34][35]
Moral philosophy[link]
Kant developed his moral philosophy in three works: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785),[36] Critique of Practical Reason (1788), and Metaphysics of Morals (1797) .
In the Groundwork, Kant's method involves trying to convert our everyday, obvious, rational[37] knowledge of morality into philosophical knowledge. The latter two works followed a method of using "practical reason", which is based only upon things about which reason can tell us, and not deriving any principles from experience, to reach conclusions which are able to be applied to the world of experience (in the second part of The Metaphysic of Morals).
Kant is known for his theory that there is a single moral obligation, which he called the "Categorical Imperative", and is derived from the concept of duty. Kant defines the demands of the moral law as "categorical imperatives". Categorical imperatives are principles that are intrinsically valid; they are good in and of themselves; they must be obeyed in all, and by all, situations and circumstances if our behavior is to observe the moral law. It is from the Categorical Imperative that all other moral obligations are generated, and by which all moral obligations can be tested. Kant also stated that the moral means and ends can be applied to the categorical imperative, that rational beings can pursue certain "ends" using the appropriate "means". Ends that are based on physical needs or wants always gives merely hypothetical imperatives. The categorical imperative, however, may be based only on something that is an "end in itself". That is, an end that is a means only to itself and not to some other need, desire, or purpose.[38] He believed that the moral law is a principle of reason itself, and is not based on contingent facts about the world, such as what would make us happy, but to act upon the moral law which has no other motive than "worthiness of being happy".[39] Accordingly, he believed that moral obligation applies only to rational agents.[40]
A categorical imperative is an unconditional obligation; that is, it has the force of an obligation regardless of our will or desires (Contrast this with hypothetical imperative)[41] In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals (1785) Kant enumerated three formulations of the categorical imperative that he believed to be roughly equivalent.[42]
Kant believed that if an action is not done with the motive of duty, then it is without moral value. He thought that every action should have pure intention behind it; otherwise it was meaningless. He did not necessarily believe that the final result was the most important aspect of an action, but that how the person felt while carrying out the action was the time at which value was set to the result.
In Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, Kant also posited the "counter-utilitarian idea that there is a difference between preferences and values and that considerations of individual rights temper calculations of aggregate utility", a concept that is an axiom in economics:[43]
Everything has either a price or a dignity. Whatever has a price can be replaced by something else as its equivalent; on the other hand, whatever is above all price, and therefore admits of no equivalent, has a dignity. But that which constitutes the condition under which alone something can be an end in itself does not have mere relative worth, i.e., price, but an intrinsic worth, i.e., a dignity. (p. 53, italics in original).
A phrase quoted by Kant, which is used to summarize the counter-utilitarian nature of his moral philosophy, is Fiat justitia, pereat mundus, ("Let justice be done, though the world perish"), which he translates loosely as "Let justice reign even if all the rascals in the world should perish from it". This appears in his 1795 Perpetual Peace (Zum ewigen Frieden. Ein philosophischer Entwurf.), Appendix 1.[44][45][46]
The first formulation[link]
The first formulation (Formula of Universal Law) of the moral imperative "requires that the maxims be chosen as though they should hold as universal laws of nature" .[42] This formulation in principle has as its supreme law the creed "Always act according to that maxim whose universality as a law you can at the same time will" and is the "only condition under which a will can never come into conflict with itself [....]"[47]
One interpretation of the first formulation is called the "universalizability test".[48] An agent's maxim, according to Kant, is his "subjective principle of human actions": that is, what the agent believes is his reason to act.[49] The universalisability test has five steps:
- Find the agent's maxim (i.e., an action paired with its motivation). Take for example the declaration "I will lie for personal benefit". Lying is the action; the motivation is to fulfill some sort of desire. Paired together, they form the maxim.
- Imagine a possible world in which everyone in a similar position to the real-world agent followed that maxim. With no exception of one's self. This is in order for you to hold people to the same principle required of yourself.
- Decide whether any contradictions or irrationalities arise in the possible world as a result of following the maxim.
- If a contradiction or irrationality arises, acting on that maxim is not allowed in the real world.
- If there is no contradiction, then acting on that maxim is permissible, and is sometimes required.
(For a modern parallel, see John Rawls' hypothetical situation, the original position.)
The second formulation[link]
The second formulation (or Formula of the End in Itself) holds that "the rational being, as by its nature an end and thus as an end in itself, must serve in every maxim as the condition restricting all merely relative and arbitrary ends".[42] The principle dictates that you "[a]ct with reference to every rational being (whether yourself or another) so that it is an end in itself in your maxim", meaning that the rational being is "the basis of all maxims of action" and "must be treated never as a mere means but as the supreme limiting condition in the use of all means, i.e., as an end at the same time".[50]
The third formulation[link]
The third formulation (Formula of Autonomy) is a synthesis of the first two and is the basis for the "complete determination of all maxims". It says "that all maxims which stem from autonomous legislation ought to harmonize with a possible realm of ends as with a realm of nature".[42] In principle, "So act as if your maxims should serve at the same time as the universal law (of all rational beings)", meaning that we should so act that we may think of ourselves as "a member in the universal realm of ends", legislating universal laws through our maxims (that is, a code of conduct), in a "possible realm of ends".[51] None may elevate themselves above the universal law, therefore it is one's duty to follow the maxim(s).
Idea of God[link]
Kant stated the practical necessity for a belief in God in his Critique of Practical Reason. As an idea of pure reason, "we do not have the slightest ground to assume in an absolute manner ... the object of this idea",[52] but adds that the idea of God cannot be separated from the relation of happiness with morality as the "ideal of the supreme good". The foundation of this connection is an intelligible moral world, and "is necessary from the practical point of view";[53] compare Voltaire: "If God did not exist, it would be necessary to invent him."[54] In the Jäsche Logic (1800) he wrote "One cannot provide objective reality for any theoretical idea, or prove it, except for the idea of freedom, because this is the condition of the moral law, whose reality is an axiom. The reality of the idea of God can only be proved by means of this idea, and hence only with a practical purpose, i.e., to act as though (als ob) there is a God, and hence only for this purpose" (9:93, trans. J. Michael Young, Lectures on Logic, p. 590–91).
Along with this idea over reason and God, Kant places thought over religion and nature, i.e. the idea of religion being natural or naturalistic. Kant saw reason as natural, and as some part of Christianity is based on reason and morality, as Kant points out this is major in the scriptures, it is inevitable that Christianity is 'natural'. However, it is not 'naturalistic' in the sense that the religion does include supernatural or transcendent belief. Aside from this, a key point is that Kant saw that the Bible should be seen as a source of natural morality no matter whether there is/was any truth behind the supernatural factor, meaning that it is not necessary to know whether the supernatural part of Christianity has any truth to abide by and use the core Christian moral code.
Kant articulates in Book Four some of his strongest criticisms of the organization and practices of Christianity that encourage what he sees as a religion of counterfeit service to God. Among the major targets of his criticism are external ritual, superstition and a hierarchical church order. He sees all of these as efforts to make oneself pleasing to God in ways other than conscientious adherence to the principle of moral rightness in the choice of one's actions. The severity of Kant's criticisms on these matters, along with his rejection of the possibility of theoretical proofs for the existence of God and his philosophical re-interpretation of some basic Christian doctrines, have provided the basis for interpretations that see Kant as thoroughly hostile to religion in general and Christianity in particular (e.g., Walsh 1967).[55]
Kant had exposure to Islam as well and reflected about the role of reason therein.[56]
Idea of freedom[link]
In the Critique of Pure Reason,[57] Kant distinguishes between the transcendental idea of freedom, which as a psychological concept is "mainly empirical" and refers to "the question whether we must admit a power of spontaneously beginning a series of successive things or states" as a real ground of necessity in regard to causality,[58] and the practical concept of freedom as the independence of our will from the "coercion" or "necessitation through sensuous impulses". Kant finds it a source of difficulty that the practical concept of freedom is founded on the transcendental idea of freedom,[59] but for the sake of practical interests uses the practical meaning, taking "no account of... its transcendental meaning," which he feels was properly "disposed of" in the Third Antinomy, and as an element in the question of the freedom of the will is for philosophy "a real stumbling-block" that has "embarrassed speculative reason".[58]
Kant calls practical "everything that is possible through freedom", and the pure practical laws that are never given through sensuous conditions but are held analogously with the universal law of causality are moral laws. Reason can give us only the "pragmatic laws of free action through the senses", but pure practical laws given by reason a priori[60] dictate "what ought to be done".[61][62]
Aesthetic philosophy[link]
Kant discusses the subjective nature of aesthetic qualities and experiences in Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime, (1764). Kant's contribution to aesthetic theory is developed in the Critique of Judgment (1790) where he investigates the possibility and logical status of "judgments of taste." In the "Critique of Aesthetic Judgment," the first major division of the Critique of Judgment, Kant used the term "aesthetic" in a manner that, according to Kant scholar W.H. Walsh, differs from its modern sense.[63] Prior to this, in the Critique of Pure Reason, to note essential differences between judgments of taste, moral judgments, and scientific judgments, Kant abandoned the term "aesthetic" as "designating the critique of taste," noting that judgments of taste could never be "directed" by "laws a priori".[64] After A. G. Baumgarten, who wrote Aesthetica (1750–58),[65] Kant was one of the first philosophers to develop and integrate aesthetic theory into a unified and comprehensive philosophical system, utilizing ideas that played an integral role throughout his philosophy.[66]
In the chapter "Analytic of the Beautiful" of the Critique of Judgment, Kant states that beauty is not a property of an artwork or natural phenomenon, but is instead a consciousness of the pleasure that attends the 'free play' of the imagination and the understanding. Even though it appears that we are using reason to decide what beautiful, the judgment is not a cognitive judgment,[67] "and is consequently not logical, but aesthetical" (§ 1). A pure judgement of taste is in fact subjective insofar as it refers to the emotional response of the subject and is based upon nothing but esteem for an object itself: it is a disinterested pleasure, and we feel that pure judgements of taste, i.e. judgements of beauty, lay claim to universal validity (§§20–22). It is important to note that this universal validity is not derived from a determinate concept of beauty but from common sense [source?]. Kant also believed that a judgement of taste shares characteristics engaged in a moral judgement: both are disinterested, and we hold them to be universal. In the chapter "Analytic of the Sublime" Kant identifies the sublime as an aesthetic quality that, like beauty, is subjective, but unlike beauty refers to an indeterminate relationship between the faculties of the imagination and of reason, and shares the character of moral judgments in the use of reason. The feeling of the sublime, itself officially divided into two distinct modes (the mathematical and the dynamical sublime), describes two subjective moments, both of which concern the relationship of the faculty of the imagination to reason. Some commentators,[68] however, argue that Kant's critical philosophy contains a third kind of the sublime, the moral sublime, which is the aesthetic response to the moral law or a representation thereof, and a development of the "noble" sublime in Kant's theory of 1764. The mathematical sublime is situated in the failure of the imagination to comprehend natural objects that appear boundless and formless, or appear "absolutely great" (§ 23–25). This imaginative failure is then recuperated through the pleasure taken in reason's assertion of the concept of infinity. In this move the faculty of reason proves itself superior to our fallible sensible self (§§ 25–26). In the dynamical sublime there is the sense of annihilation of the sensible self as the imagination tries to comprehend a vast might. This power of nature threatens us but through the resistance of reason to such sensible annihilation, the subject feels a pleasure and a sense of the human moral vocation. This appreciation of moral feeling through exposure to the sublime helps to develop moral character.
Kant had developed the distinction between an object of art as a material value subject to the conventions of society and the transcendental condition of the judgment of taste as a "refined" value in the propositions of his Idea of A Universal History (1784). In the Fourth and Fifth Theses of that work he identified all art as the "fruits of unsociableness" due to men's "antagonism in society",[69] and in the Seventh Thesis asserted that while such material property is indicative of a civilized state, only the ideal of morality and the universalization of refined value through the improvement of the mind of man "belongs to culture".[70]
Political philosophy[link]
Main article: Political philosophy of Immanuel Kant
In Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch[71] Kant listed several conditions that he thought necessary for ending wars and creating a lasting peace. They included a world of constitutional republics.[72] His classical republican theory was extended in the Science of Right', the first part of the Metaphysics of Morals (1797).[73]
"Kant's political teaching may be summarized in a phrase: republican government and international organization. In more characteristically Kantian terms, it is doctrine of the state based upon the law (Rechtsstaat) and of eternal peace. Indeed, in each of these formulations, both terms express the same idea: that of legal constitution or of "peace through law." ... Taken simply by itself, Kant's political philosophy, being essentially a legal doctrine, rejects by definition the opposition between moral education and the play of passions as alternate foundations for social life. The state is defined as the union of men under law. The state rightly so called is constituted by laws which are necessary a priori because they flow from the very concept of law. A regime can be judged by no other criteria nor be assigned any other functions, than those proper to the lawful order as such." [74]
He opposed "democracy," which at his time meant direct democracy, believing that majority rule posed a threat to individual liberty. He stated, "...democracy is, properly speaking, necessarily a despotism, because it establishes an executive power in which 'all' decide for or even against one who does not agree; that is, 'all,' who are not quite all, decide, and this is a contradiction of the general will with itself and with freedom."[75] As most writers at the time he distinguished three forms of government i.e. democracy, aristocracy, and monarchy with mixed government as the most ideal form of it.
Anthropology[link]
Kant lectured on anthropology for over 25 years. His Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View was published in 1798. (This was the subject of Michel Foucault's doctoral dissertation.) Kant's Lectures on Anthropology were published for the first time in 1997 in German. The former was translated into English and published by the Cambridge Texts in the History of Philosophy series in 2006.[76]
Influence[link]
Kant's influence on Western thought has been profound.[77] Over and above his influence on specific thinkers, Kant changed the framework within which philosophical inquiry has been carried out. He accomplished a paradigm shift: very little philosophy is now carried out as an extension, or in the style of pre-Kantian philosophy. This shift consists in several closely related innovations that have become axiomatic, in philosophy itself and in the social sciences and humanities generally:
- Kant's "Copernican revolution", that placed the role of the human subject or knower at the center of inquiry into our knowledge, such that it is impossible to philosophize about things as they are independently of us or of how they are for us;[78]
- His invention of critical philosophy, that is of the notion of being able to discover and systematically explore possible inherent limits to our ability to know through philosophical reasoning
- His creation of the concept of "conditions of possibility", as in his notion of "the conditions of possible experience" – that is that things, knowledge, and forms of consciousness rest on prior conditions that make them possible, so that, to understand or to know them, we must first understand these conditions
- His theory that objective experience is actively constituted or constructed by the functioning of the human mind
- His notion of moral autonomy as central to humanity
- His assertion of the principle that human beings should be treated as ends rather than as means
Some or all of these Kantian ideas can be seen in schools of thought as different from one another as German Idealism, Marxism, positivism, phenomenology, existentialism, critical theory, linguistic philosophy, structuralism, post-structuralism, and deconstructionism.[79][dubious – discuss]
Historical influence[link]
During his own life, there was much critical attention paid to his thought . He did have a positive influence on Reinhold, Fichte, Schelling, Hegel, and Novalis during the 1780s and 1790s. The school of thinking known as German Idealism developed from his writings. The German Idealists Fichte and Schelling, for example, tried to bring traditional "metaphysically" laden notions like "the Absolute," "God," or "Being" into the scope of Kant's critical thought.[80] In so doing, the German Idealists tried to reverse Kant's view that we cannot know what we cannot observe.
Hegel was one of his first major critics. In response to what he saw as Kant's abstract and formal account, Hegel brought about an ethic focused on the "ethical life" of the community.[81] But Hegel's notion of "ethical life" is meant to subsume, rather than replace, Kantian ethics. And Hegel can be seen as trying to defend Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "desires," by means of reason. Thus, in contrast to later critics like Nietzsche or Russell, Hegel shares some of Kant's most basic concerns.[82]
Kant's thinking on religion was used in Britain to challenge the decline in religious faith in the nineteenth century. British Catholic writers, notably G. K. Chesterton and Hilaire Belloc, followed this approach. Ronald Englefield debated this movement, and Kant's use of language. See Ronald Englefield's article,[83] reprinted in Englefield[84] Criticisms of Kant were common in the realist views of the new positivism at that time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was strongly influenced by Kant's transcendental idealism. He, like G. E. Schulze, Jacobi and Fichte before him, was critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Things in themselves, they argued, are neither the cause of what we observe nor are they completely beyond our access. Ever since the first Critique of Pure Reason philosophers have been critical of Kant's theory of the thing in itself. Many have argued, if such a thing exists beyond experience then one cannot posit that it affects us causally, since that would entail stretching the category 'causality' beyond the realm of experience. For a review of this problem and the relevant literature see The Thing in Itself and the Problem of Affection in the revised edition of Henry Allison's Kant's Transcendental Idealism. For Schopenhauer things in themselves do not exist outside the non-rational will. The world, as Schopenhauer would have it, is the striving and largely unconscious will.
With the success and wide influence of Hegel's writings, Kant's influence began to wane, though there was in Germany a movement that hailed a return to Kant in the 1860s, beginning with the publication of Kant und die Epigonen in 1865 by Otto Liebmann. His motto was "Back to Kant", and a re-examination of his ideas began (See Neo-Kantianism). During the turn of the 20th century there was an important revival of Kant's theoretical philosophy, known as the Marburg School, represented in the work of Hermann Cohen, Paul Natorp, Ernst Cassirer,[85] and anti-Neo-Kantian Nicolai Hartmann.[86]
Kant's notion of "Critique" or criticism has been quite influential. The Early German Romantics, especially Friedrich Schlegel in his "Athenaeum Fragments", used Kant's self-reflexive conception of criticism in their Romantic theory of poetry.[87] Also in Aesthetics, Clement Greenberg, in his classic essay "Modernist Painting", uses Kantian criticism, what Greenberg refers to as "immanent criticism", to justify the aims of Abstract painting, a movement Greenberg saw as aware of the key limitiaton—flatness—that makes up the medium of painting.[88] French philosopher Michel Foucault was also greatly influenced by Kant's notion of "Critique" and wrote several pieces on Kant for a re-thinking of the Enlightenment as a form of "critical thought". He went so far as to classify his own philosophy as a "critical history of modernity, rooted in Kant".[89]
Kant believed that mathematical truths were forms of synthetic a priori knowledge, which means they are necessary and universal, yet known through intuition.[90] Kant’s often brief remarks about mathematics influenced the mathematical school known as intuitionism, a movement in philosophy of mathematics opposed to Hilbert’s formalism, and the logicism of Frege and Bertrand Russell.[91]
Influence on modern thinkers[link]
With his Perpetual Peace, Kant is considered to have foreshadowed many of the ideas that have come to form the democratic peace theory, one of the main controversies in political science.[92]
The Kantian paradigm shift in philosophy and metaphysics has been sustained. Some British and American philosophers trace their intellectual origins to Hume:[93] however, Kant acknowledged Hume as awakening him from his 'dogmatic slumbers', and his work articulated and clarified the issues looked at by Hume.[94] (See The silent decade section, above).
Prominent recent Kantians include the British philosopher P. F. Strawson,[95] the American philosophers Wilfrid Sellars[96] and Christine Korsgaard.[97]
Due to the influence of Strawson and Sellars, among others, there has been a renewed interest in Kant's view of the mind. Central to many debates in philosophy of psychology and cognitive science is Kant's conception of the unity of consciousness.[98]
Kant's work on mathematics and synthetic a priori knowledge is also cited by theoretical physicist Albert Einstein as an early influence on his intellectual development.[99]
Jürgen Habermas and John Rawls are two significant political and moral philosophers whose work is strongly influenced by Kant's moral philosophy.[100] They have each argued against relativism,[101] supporting the Kantian view that universality is essential to any viable moral philosophy.
Kant's influence also has extended to the social and behavioral sciences, as in the sociology of Max Weber, the psychology of Jean Piaget, and the linguistics of Noam Chomsky. Because of the thoroughness of the Kantian paradigm shift, his influence extends to thinkers who neither specifically refer to his work nor use his terminology.
Tomb and statue[link]
Kant's tomb is today in a mausoleum adjoining the northeast corner of Königsberg Cathedral in what is now known as Kaliningrad, Russia. The mausoleum was constructed by the architect Friedrich Lahrs and was finished in 1924 in time for the bicentenary of Kant's birth. Originally, Kant was buried inside the cathedral, but in 1880 his remains were moved outside and placed in a neo-Gothic chapel adjoining the northeast corner of the cathedral. Over the years, the chapel became dilapidated before it was demolished to make way for the mausoleum, which was built on the same spot, where it is today.
The tomb and its mausoleum are some of the few artifacts of German times preserved by the Soviets after they conquered and annexed the city. Today, many newlyweds bring flowers to the mausoleum.
A replica of the statue of Kant that stood in German times in front of the main University of Königsberg building was donated by a German entity in the early 1990s and placed in the same grounds.
After the expulsion of Königsberg's German population at the end of World War II, the historical University of Königsberg where Kant taught was replaced by the Russian-speaking Kaliningrad State University, which took up the campus and surviving buildings of the historic German university. In 2005, that Russian-speaking university was renamed Immanuel Kant State University of Russia in honour of Kant. The change of name was announced at a ceremony attended by President Vladimir Putin of Russia and Chancellor Gerhard Schröder of Germany, and the university further formed a Kant Society, dedicated to the study of Kantianism.
List of works[link]
- (1746) Thoughts on the True Estimation of Vital Forces (Gedanken von der wahren Schätzung der lebendigen Kräfte)
- (1755) A New Explanation of the First Principles of Metaphysical Knowledge (Neue Erhellung der ersten Grundsätze metaphysischer Erkenntnisse; Doctoral Thesis: Principiorum primorum cognitionis metaphysicae nova dilucidatio)
- (1755) Universal Natural History and Theory of Heaven (Allgemeine Naturgeschichte und Theorie des Himmels)
- (1756) Monadologia Physica
- (1762) The False Subtlety of the Four Syllogistic Figures (Die falsche Spitzfindigkeit der vier syllogistischen Figuren)
- (1763) The Only Possible Argument in Support of a Demonstration of the Existence of God (Der einzig mögliche Beweisgrund zu einer Demonstration des Daseins Gottes)
- (1763) Attempt to Introduce the Concept of Negative Magnitudes into Philosophy (Versuch den Begriff der negativen Größen in die Weltweisheit einzuführen)
- (1764) Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (Beobachtungen über das Gefühl des Schönen und Erhabenen)
- (1764) Essay on the Illness of the Head (Über die Krankheit des Kopfes)
- (1764) Inquiry Concerning the Distinctness of the Principles of Natural Theology and Morality (the Prize Essay) (Untersuchungen über die Deutlichkeit der Grundsätze der natürlichen Theologie und der Moral)
- (1766) Dreams of a Spirit Seer (On Emmanuel Swedenborg) (Träume eines Geistersehers)
- (1770) Inaugural Dissertation (De mundi sensibilis atque intelligibilis forma et principiis)
- (1775) On the Different Races of Man (Über die verschiedenen Rassen der Menschen)
- (1781) First edition of the Critique of Pure Reason[102] (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)[103]
- (1783) "Prolegomena to any Future Metaphysics"[104] (Prolegomena zu einer jeden künftigen Metaphysik)
- (1784) "An Answer to the Question: What Is Enlightenment?" (Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklärung?)[105]
- (1784) "Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose" (Idee zu einer allgemeinen Geschichte in weltbürgerlicher Absicht)
- (1785) Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals (Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten)
- (1786) Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science (Metaphysische Anfangsgründe der Naturwissenschaft)
- (1786) Conjectural Beginning of Human History
- (1787) Second edition of the Critique of Pure Reason[106] (Kritik der reinen Vernunft)[107]
- (1788) Critique of Practical Reason[108] (Kritik der praktischen Vernunft)[109]
- (1790) Critique of Judgement (Kritik der Urteilskraft)[110]
- (1790) The Science of Right[111]
- (1793) Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (Die Religion innerhalb der Grenzen der bloßen Vernunft)[112]
- (1793) On the Old Saw: That may be right in theory, but it won't work in practice (Über den Gemeinspruch: Das mag in der Theorie richtig sein, taugt aber nicht für die Praxis)
- (1795) Perpetual Peace[113] (Zum ewigen Frieden)[114]
- (1796-7) The Metaphysics of Ethics. Translated with an introd. and appendix by J.W. Semple (1836) online text in English
- (1797) Metaphysics of Morals (Metaphysik der Sitten)
- (1798) Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View (Anthropologie in pragmatischer Hinsicht)
- (1798) The Contest of Faculties[115] (Der Streit der Fakultäten)[116]
- (1800) Logic (Logik)
- (1803) On Pedagogy (Über Pädagogik)[117]
- (1804) Opus Postumum
- (1817) Lectures on Philosophical Theology (Immanuel Kants Vorlesungen über die philosophische Religionslehre edited by K. H. L. Pölitz). [The English edition of A. W. Wood & G. M. Clark (Cornell, 1978) is based on Pölitz' second edition, 1830, of these lectures.][118]
See also[link]
Criticism[link] |
Footnotes[link]
- ^ Crane Brinton. "Enlightenment". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 2, p. 519. Macmillan, 1967.
- ^ Kant, Immanuel; Kitcher, Patricia (intro.); Pluhar, W. (trans.) (1996). Critique of Pure Reason. Indianapolis: Hackett. xxviii.
- ^ "Transcendental Arguments (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. 2011-02-25. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/transcendental-arguments/. Retrieved 2011-10-22.
- ^ Rohlf, Michael, "Immanuel Kant", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2010 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
- ^ "Immanuel Kant (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. 2010-05-20. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant/. Retrieved 2011-10-22.
- ^ Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001, p. 26
- ^ Lewis, Rick. 2005. 'Kant 200 Years On'. Philosophy Now. No. 49.
- ^ "Cosmopolis". Koenigsberg-is-dead.de. 2001-04-23. http://www.koenigsberg-is-dead.de/I_Cosmopolis.html. Retrieved 2009-07-24. Kant's mother's name is sometimes erroneously given as Anna Regina Porter.
- ^ http://www.csudh.edu/phenom_studies/western/lect_9.html
- ^ Biographical information sourced from: Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-49704-3 the standard biography of Kant in English.
- ^ Kant, Immanuel. Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime. Trans. John T. Goldthwait. University of California Press, 1961, 2003. ISBN 0-520-24078-2
- ^ The American International Encyclopedia (New York: J.J. Little & Ives, 1954), Vol. IX.
- ^ George Gamow, One, Two, Three... Infinity, p. 300ff. Viking Press, 1954
- ^ Cf., for example, Susan Shell, The Embodiment of Reason (Chicago, 1996)
- ^ http://hardproblem.ru/wp-content/uploads/2010/06/Vasilyev-The-Origin.pdf
- ^ Christopher Kul-Want and Andrzej Klimowski, Introducing Kant (Cambridge: Icon Books, 2005).[citation needed] ISBN 1-84046-664-2
- ^ Ein Jahrhundert deutscher Literaturkritik, vol/. III, Der Aufstieg zur Klassik in der Kritik der Zeit (Berlin, 1959), pp. 315; as quoted in Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.
- ^ Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987 pp. 28–9.
- ^ Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987, p. 62.
- ^ a b c Derrida Vacant Chair p. 44.
- ^ "Open letter by Kant denouncing Fichte's Philosophy (in German)". Korpora.org. http://www.korpora.org/Kant/aa12/370.html. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ Peirce, C.S., Collected Papers of Charles Sanders Peirce, v.1, (HUP, 1960), 'Kant and his Refutation of Idealism' pp. 15
- ^ Kant, Immanuel, Logic, G.B. Jäsche (ed), R.S. Hartman, W. Schwarz (translators), Indianapolis, 1984, p. xv.
- ^ Norman Davies, Europe: a History, p. 687.
- ^ Critique of Pure Reason, A801.
- ^ The Science of Right, Conclusion.
- ^ Critique of Pure Reason, A811.
- ^ In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason Kant refers to space as "no discursive or...general conception of the relation of things, but a pure intuition" and maintained that "We can only represent to ourselves one space". The "general notion of spaces...depends solely upon limitations" (Meikeljohn trans., A25). In the second edition of the CPR, Kant adds, "The original representation of space is an a priori intuition, not a concept" (Kemp Smith trans., B40). In regard to time, Kant states that "Time is not a discursive, or what is called a general concept, but a pure form of sensible intuition. Different times are but parts of one and the same time; and the representation which can be given only through a single object is intuition" (A31/B47). For the differences in the discursive use of reason according to concepts and its intuitive use through the construction of concepts, see Critique of Pure Reason (A719/B747 ff. and A837/B865). On "One and the same thing in space and time" and the mathematical construction of concepts, see A724/B752.
- ^ See, e.g., "Kant, Immanuel", in The Columbia Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Bartleby.com[dead link]
- ^ The German word Anschauung, which Kant used, literally means 'looking at' and generally means what in philosophy in English is called "perception". However it sometimes is rendered as "intuition": not, however, with the vernacular meaning of an indescribable or mystical experience or sixth sense, but rather with the meaning of the direct perception or grasping of sensory phenomena. In this article, both terms, "perception" and "intuition" are used to stand for Kant's Anschauung.
- ^ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason [1781], trans. Norman Kemp Smith (N.Y.: St. Martins, 1965), A 51/B 75.
- ^ a b c d e f g Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to perhaps Any Future Metaphysics, pages 35 to 43.
- ^ Deleuze on Kant, from where the definitions of a priori and a posteriori were obtained.
- ^ Immanuel Kant, Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, pages 35 to 43.
- ^ Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, the Introduction to the Hackett edition.
- ^ Kant, Immanuel. Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. Trans. Lewis White Beck. Page numbers citing this work are Beck's marginal numbers that refer to the page numbers of the standard edition of Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin, 1902–38.
- ^ The distinction between rational and philosophical knowledge is given in the Preface to the Groundwork, 1785.
- ^ Kant, Foundations, p. 421.
- ^ Critique of Pure Reason, A806/B834.
- ^ Kant, Foundations, p. 408.
- ^ Kant, Foundations, p. 420–1.
- ^ a b c d Kant, Foundations, p. 436.
- ^ Millennium Ecosystem Assessment (2003) Ecosystems and Well-being: A Framework for Assessment. Washington DC: Island Press, p. 142.
- ^ "Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch: Appendix 1". Constitution.org. http://www.constitution.org/kant/append1.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ Project for a Perpetual Peace, p. 61. Books.google.com. http://books.google.com/books?id=LykHAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA61&dq=pereat+mundus+inauthor:Kant&lr=&as_brr=0&ei=pcfnSO-_GYPsswPPuKnLBg. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ Immanuel Kant's Werke, revidirte Gesammtausg, p. 456. Books.google.com. http://books.google.com/books?id=QskIAAAAQAAJ&pg=PA456&dq=pereat+mundus+inauthor:Kant&lr=lang_de&as_brr=0&ei=GMjnSKCcEYScswPputXqBg. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ Kant, Foundations, p. 437.
- ^ "Kant and the German Enlightenment" in "History of Ethics". Encyclopedia of Philosophy, Vol. 3, pp. 95–96. MacMillan, 1973.
- ^ Kant, Foundations, pp. 400, 429.
- ^ Kant, Foundations, pp. 437–8.
- ^ Kant, Foundations, pp. 438–9. See also Kingdom of Ends
- ^ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A685/B713.
- ^ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A810/B838.
- ^ Originally, "Si Dieu n'existait pas, il faudrait l'inventer.", [[q:Voltaire|]], Épître à l'Auteur du Livre des Trois Imposteurs (1770-11-10).
- ^ "Kant's Philosophy of Religion (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)". Plato.stanford.edu. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/kant-religion/. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ History of Islam in German thought. Taylor & Francis. http://books.google.com/books?id=r2r6ru7X3cIC&pg=PA29. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ The Norman Kemp Smith translation has been used for this section, with citation noting the pagination of the first and second editions.
- ^ a b Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A448/B476.
- ^ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A534/B562.
- ^ the same distinction of transcendental and practical meaning can be applied to the idea of God, with the proviso that the practical concept of freedom can be experienced (Critique of Pure Reason, A801-804/B829-832).
- ^ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A800–2/B828–30.
- ^ The concept of freedom is also handled in the third section of the Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals. In the Critique of Practical Reason see § VII and § VIII.
- ^ Critique of Judgment in "Kant, Immanuel" Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol 4. Macmillan, 1973.
- ^ Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, A22/B36.
- ^ Beardsley, Monroe. "History of Aesthetics". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 1, section on "Toward a unified aesthetics", p. 25, Macmillan 1973. Baumgarten coined the term "aesthetics" and expanded, clarified, and unified Wolffian aesthetic theory, but had left the Aesthetica unfinished (See also: Tonelli, Giorgio. "Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten". Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 1, Macmillan 1973). In Bernard's translation of the Critique of Judgment he indicates in the notes that Kant's reference in § 15 in regard to the identification of perfection and beauty is probably a reference to Baumgarten.
- ^ German Idealism in "History of Aesthetics" Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol 1. Macmillan, 1973.
- ^ Kant's general discussions of the distinction between "cognition" and "conscious of" are also given in the Critique of Pure Reason (notably A320/B376), and section V and the conclusion of section VIII of his Introduction in Logic.
- ^ Clewis, Robert. 2009. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. http://www.cambridge.org/us/knowledge/isbn/item2326741/?site_locale=en_US
- ^ Kant, Immanuel. Idea for a Universal History. Trans. Lewis White Beck (20, 22). Page numbers are Beck's marginal numbers that refer to the page numbers of the standard edition of Königliche Preussische Akademie der Wissenschaften. Berlin, 1902–38.
- ^ Kant, Immanuel. Idea for a Universal History. Trans. Lewis White Beck (26).
- ^ Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch (1795)
- ^ Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace. Trans. Lewis White Beck (377).
- ^ Manfred Riedel Between Tradition and Revolution: The Hegelian Transformation of Political Philosophy, Cambridge 1984
- ^ History of Political Philosophy, edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Cropsey, The University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp.581-582,603
- ^ Kant, Immanuel. Perpetual Peace. Trans. Lewis White Beck (352).
- '^ Anthropology from a Pragmatic Point of View, ed. Robert B. Louden, introduction by Manfred Kuehn, Cambridge University Press, 2006
- ^ Prof. Oliver A. Johnson claims that, "With the possible exception of Plato's Republic, (Critique of Pure Reason) is the most important philosophical book ever written." Article on Kant within the collection "Great thinkers of the Western World", Ian P. McGreal, Ed., HarperCollins, 1992.
- ^ See Stephen Palmquist, "The Architectonic Form of Kant's Copernican Logic", Metaphilosophy 17:4 (October 1986), pp.266-288; revised and reprinted as Chapter III of Kant's System of Perspectives: An architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy (Lanham: University Press of America, 1993).
- ^ "Kant, Immanuel". Newworldencyclopedia.org. http://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Kant. Retrieved 2011-10-22.
- ^ There is much debate in the recent scholarship about the extent to which Fichte and Schelling actually overstep the boundaries of Kant's critical philosophy, thus entering the realm of dogmatic or pre-Critical philosophy. Beiser's German Idealism discusses some of these issues. Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2002.
- ^ Hegel, Natural Law: The Scientific Ways of Treating Natural Law, Its Place in Moral Philosophy, and Its Relation to the Positive Sciences. trans. T. M. Knox. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1975. Hegel's mature view and his concept of "ethical life" is elaborated in his Philosophy of Right. Hegel, Philosophy of Right. trans. T. M. Knox. Oxford University Press, 1967.
- ^ Robert Pippin's Hegel's Idealism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989) emphasizes the continuity of Hegel's concerns with Kant's. Robert Wallace, Hegel's Philosophy of Reality, Freedom, and God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005) explains how Hegel's Science of Logic defends Kant's idea of freedom as going beyond finite "inclinations", contra skeptics such as David Hume.
- ^ Englefield, Ronald, Kant as Defender of the Faith in Nineteenth-century England", Question, 12, 16–27, (Pemberton, London)
- ^ Englefield, Ronald, Critique of Pure Verbiage, Essays on Abuses of Language in Literary, Religious, and Philosophical Writings, edited by G. A. Wells and D. R. Oppenheimer, Open Court, 1990.
- ^ Beck, Lewis White. "Neo-Kantianism". In Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 5–6. Macmillan, 1973. Article on Neo-Kantianism by a translator and scholar of Kant.
- ^ Cerf, Walter. "Nicolai Hartmann". In Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Vol. 3-4. Macmillan, 1973. Nicolai was a realist who later rejected the idealism of Neo-Kantianism, his anti-Neo-Kantian views emerging with the publication of the second volume of Hegel (1929).
- ^ Schlegel, Friedrich. "Athenaeum Fragments", in Philosophical Fragments. Trans. Peter Firchow. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1991. See especially fragments Nos. 1, 43, 44.
- ^ Greenberg, Clement. "Modernist Painting", in The Philosophy of Art, ed. Alex Neill and Aaron Ridley, McGraw-Hill, 1995.
- ^ See "Essential Works of Foucault: 1954-1984 vol.2: Aesthetics, Method, and Epistemology." ed by James Faubion, Trans. Robert Hurley et al. New York City, New York: The New Press, 1998 (2010 reprint). See essay "Foucault by Maurice Florence" entry by Foucault submitted under pseudonym.
- ^ For a discussion and qualified defense of this position, see Stephen Palmquist, "A Priori Knowledge in Perspective: (I) Mathematics, Method and Pure Intuition", The Review of Metaphysics 41:1 (September 1987), pp.3-22.
- ^ Körner, Stephan, The Philosophy of Mathematics, Dover, 1986. For an analysis of Kant's writings on mathematics see, Friedman, Michael, Kant and the Exact Sciences, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1992.
- ^ Ray, James Lee. Does Democracy Cause Peace? Annual Review of Political Science 1998. 1:27-46.
- ^ Empiricists like A. J. Ayer stand out in this regard. See A. J. Ayer's Language Truth and Logic. Dover, 1952.
- ^ De Pierris, Graciela and Friedman, Michael, "Kant and Hume on Causality", The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2008 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
- ^ Strawson, P. F., The Bounds of Sense: An Essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge: 2004. When first published in 1966, this book forced many Anglo-American philosophers to reconsider Kant's Critique of Pure Reason.
- ^ Sellars, Wilfrid, Science and Metaphysics: Variations on Kantian Themes. Ridgeview Publishing Company, 1967
- ^ Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge; New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-521-49644-6, ISBN 0-521-49962-3 (pbk.) Not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics
- ^ Brook, Andrew. Kant and the Mind. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994. See also, Meerbote, R. "Kant's Functionalism". In: J. C. Smith, ed. Historical Foundations of Cognitive Science. Dordrecht, Holland: Reidel, 1991. Brook has an article on Kant's View of the Mind in the Stanford Encyclopedia
- ^ Issacson, Walter. "Einstein: His Life and Universe." p. 20.
- ^ See Habermas, J. Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action. Trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1996. For Rawls see, Rawls, John. Theory of Justice Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971. Rawls has a well-known essay on Kant's concept of good. See, Rawls, "Themes in Kant's Moral Philosophy" in Kant's Transcendental Deductions. Ed. Eckart Förster. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1989.
- ^ Habermas, J. (1994): The Unity of Reason in the Diversity of Its Voices. In: Habermas, J. (Eds.): Postmetaphysical Thinking. Political Essays, Cambridge, Massachusetts: 115- 148.
- ^ Immanuel Kant. "The Critique of Pure Reason". Etext.library.adelaide.edu.au. http://etext.library.adelaide.edu.au/k/kant/immanuel/k16p/. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ Immanuel Kant (2009-07-20). "Projekt Gutenberg-DE - Spiegel Onlinr - Nachrichten - Kultur". Gutenberg.spiegel.de. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/krva/krva.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ http://eserver.org/philosophy/kant-prolegomena.txt
- ^ Frank-Christian Lilienweihs (1999-06-10). "Immanuel Kant: Beantwortung der Frage: Was ist Aufklaerung?". Prometheusonline.de. http://www.prometheusonline.de/heureka/philosophie/klassiker/kant/aufklaerung.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ "Critique of Pure Reason". Hkbu.edu.hk. 2003-10-31. http://www.hkbu.edu.hk/~ppp/cpr/toc.html. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ "Projekt Gutenberg-DE - Spiegel Online- Nachrichten - Kultur". Gutenberg.spiegel.de. 2009-07-20. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/krvb/krvb.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ http://eserver.org/philosophy/kant/critique-of-practical-reaso.txt
- ^ Immanuel Kant (2009-07-20). "Projekt Gutenberg-DE - Spiegel Online - Nachrichten - Kultur". Gutenberg.spiegel.de. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/kritikpr/kritikpr.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ [1][dead link]
- ^ http://eserver.org/philosophy/kant/science-of-right.txt
- ^ Immanuel Kant. "Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone by Immanuel Kant 1793". Marxists.org. http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/religion/religion-within-reason.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ "Immanuel Kant, "Perpetual Peace"". Mtholyoke.edu. http://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/kant/kant1.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ "Immanuel Kant: Zum ewigen Frieden, 12.02.2004 (Friedensratschlag)". Uni-kassel.de. http://www.uni-kassel.de/fb5/frieden/themen/Theorie/kant.html. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ "Kant, The Contest of Faculties". Chnm.gmu.edu. http://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/564/. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ Immanuel Kant (2009-07-20). "Projekt Gutenberg-DE - Spiegel Online - Nachrichten - Kultur". Gutenberg.spiegel.de. http://gutenberg.spiegel.de/kant/streit/streit.htm. Retrieved 2009-07-24.
- ^ Uni-bremen.de
- ^ As noted by Allen Wood in his Introduction, p.12. Wood further speculates that the lectures themselves were delivered in the Winter of 1783-84.
References and further reading[link]
Any suggestion of further reading on Kant has to take cognizance of the fact that his work has dominated philosophy like no other figure after him. Nevertheless, several guideposts can be made out. In Germany, the most important contemporary interpreter of Kant and the movement of German Idealism he began is Dieter Henrich, who has some work available in English. P.F. Strawson's "The Bounds of Sense" (1969) played a significant role in determining the contemporary reception of Kant in England and America. More recent interpreters of note in the English-speaking world include Lewis White Beck, Jonathan Bennett, Henry Allison, Paul Guyer, Christine Korsgaard, Stephen Palmquist, Robert B. Pippin, Roger Scruton, Rudolf Makkreel, and Béatrice Longuenesse.
General introductions to his thought[link]
- Scruton, Roger. Kant: a Very Short Introduction. Oxford University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-19-280199-6 (provides a brief account of his life, and a lucid introduction to the three major critiques)
- Broad, C. D. Kant: an Introduction. Cambridge University Press, 1978. ISBN 0-521-21755-5, ISBN 0-521-29265-4
- Gardner, Sebastian. Kant and the Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1999. ISBN 0-415-11909-X
- Martin, Gottfried. Kant's Metaphysics and Theory of Science. Greenwood Press, 1955 ISBN 978-0-8371-7154-8 (elucidates Kant's most fundamental concepts in their historical context)
- Perez, Daniel Omar. Kant e o problema da significação. Curitiba: Editora Champagnat, 2008. ISBN 978-85-7292-187-9 (Portuguese)
- Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's System of Perspectives: an architectonic interpretation of the Critical philosophy. Lanham, MD: University Press of America, 1993. ISBN 0-8191-8927-8 (for availability see link)
- Seung, T. K. 2007. Kant: a Guide for the Perplexed. London: Continuum. ISBN 0-8264-8580-4
- Uleman, Jennifer. An Introduction to Kant's Moral Philosophy. Cambridge University Press, 2010. ISBN 978-0-521-13644-0
- Satyananda Giri. Kant. Durham, CT: Strategic Publishing Group, 2010. ISBN 978-1-60911-686-6
Biography and historical context[link]
- Beck, Lewis White. Early German Philosophy: Kant and his Predecessors. Harvard University Press, 1969. (a survey of Kant's intellectual background)
- Beiser, Frederick C. The Fate of Reason: German Philosophy from Kant to Fichte. Harvard University Press, 1987.
- Beiser, Frederick C. German Idealism: the Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781-1801. Harvard University Press, 2002
- Cassirer, Ernst. Kant's Life and Thought. Translation of Kants Leben und Lehre. Trans., Jame S. Haden, intr. Stephan Körner. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1981.
- Chamberlain, Houston Stewart. Immanuel Kant – a study and a comparison with Goethe, Leonardo da Vinci, Bruno, Plato and Descartes, the authorised translation from the German by Lord Redesdale, with his 'Introduction', The Bodley Head, London, 1914, (2 volumes).
- Gulyga, Arsenij. Immanuel Kant: His Life and Thought. Trans., Marijan Despaltović. Boston: Birkhäuser, 1987.
- Johnson, G.R. (ed.). Kant on Swedenborg. Dreams of a Spirit-Seer and Other Writings. Swedenborg Foundation, 2002. (new translation and analysis, many supplementary texts)
- Kuehn, Manfred. Kant: a Biography. Cambridge University Press, 2001. ISBN 0-521-49704-3. (now the standard biography of Kant in English)
- Lehner, Ulrich L., Kants Vorsehungskonzept auf dem Hintergrund der deutschen Schulphilosophie und -theologie (Leiden: 2007) (Kant's concept of Providence and its background in German school philosophy and theology)
- Pinkard, Terry. German Philosophy, 1760-1860: the Legacy of Idealism. Cambridge, 2002.
- Sassen, Brigitte (ed.). Kant's Early Critics: the Empiricist Critique of the Theoretical Philosophy, Cambridge, 2000.
Collections of essays[link]
- Guyer, Paul. ed. The Cambridge Companion to Kant. Cambridge University Press, 1992. ISBN 0-521-36587-2, ISBN 0-521-36768-9. Excellent collection of papers that covers most areas of Kant's thought
- Förster, Eckart ed. "Kant's Transcendental Deductions: The Three 'Critiques' and the 'Opus Postumum.'" Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1989. Includes an important essay by Dieter Henrich'
- Cohen, Ted and Paul Guyer eds. Essays in Kant's Aesthetics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982. Essays on Kant's Critique of Judgment
- Firestone, Chris L. and Stephen Palmquist (eds.). Kant and the New Philosophy of Religion. Indiana University Press, 2006. ISBN 0-253-21800-4
- Mohanty, J.N. and Robert W. Shahan. eds. Essays on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1982. ISBN 0-8061-1782-6
- Phillips, Dewi et al. Kant and Kierkegaard on Religion. Palgrave Macmillian, 2000, ISBN 0-312-23234-9 Collection of essays about Kantian religion and its influence on Kierkegaardian and contemporary philosophy of religion.
- Proceedings of the International Kant Congresses. Several Congresses (numbered) edited by various publishers.
Theoretical philosophy[link]
- Allison, Henry. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1983, 2004. ISBN 0-300-03629-9, ISBN 0-300-03002-9. (a very influential defense of Kant's idealism, recently revised)
- Ameriks, Karl. Kant's Theory of Mind: An Analysis of the Paralogisms of Pure Reason. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1982. (one of the first detailed studies of the Dialectic in English)
- Banham, Gary. Kant's Transcendental Imagination London and New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006.
- Deleuze, Gilles. Kant's Critical Philosophy. Trans., Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam. University of Minnesota Press, 1984. ISBN 0-8166-1341-9, ISBN 0-8166-1436-9
- Dottarelli, Luciano. Kant e la metafisica come scienza, Roma: Erre Emme, 1995. ISBN 88-85378-75-7 (Italian)
- Farias, Vanderlei de Oliveira. Kants Realismus und der Aussenweltskeptizismus. OLMS. Hildesheim, Zürich, New York. 2006. (German)
- Gram, Moltke S. The Transcendental Turn: The Foundation of Kant's Idealism. Gainesville: University Presses of Florida, 1984. ISBN 0-8130-0787-9
- Greenberg, Robert. Kant's Theory of A Priori Knowledge. Penn State Press, 2001 ISBN 0-271-02083-0
- Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987. (modern defense of the view that Kant's theoretical philosophy is a "patchwork" of ill-fitting arguments)
- Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. Princeton University Press, 2008.
- Heidegger, Martin. Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. Trans., Richard Taft. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997. ISBN 0-253-21067-4
- Henrich, Dieter. The Unity of Reason: Essays on Kant’s Philosophy. Ed. with introduction by Richard L. Velkley; trans. Jeffrey Edwards et al. Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-674-92905-5
- Kemp Smith, Norman. A Commentary to Kant's ‘Critique of Pure Reason. London: Macmillan, 1930. (somewhat dated, but influential commentary on the first Critique, recently reprinted)
- Kitcher, Patricia. Kant's Transcendental Psychology. New York: Oxford University Press, 1990.
- Longuenesse, Béatrice. Kant and the Capacity to Judge. Princeton University Press, 1998. ISBN 0-691-04348-5. (argues that the notion of judgment provides the key to understanding the overall argument of the first Critique)
- Melnick, Arthur. Kant's Analogies of Experience. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1973. (important study of Kant's Analogies, including his defense of the principle of causality)
- Paton, H. J. Kant’s Metaphysic of Experience: a Commentary on the First Half of the Kritik der reinen Vernunft. Two volumes. London: Macmillan, 1936. (eExtensive study of Kant's theoretical philosophy)
- Pippin, Robert B.. Kant's Theory of Form: an Essay on the Critique of Pure Reason. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982. (influential examination of the formal character of Kant's work)
- Sala, Giovanni. Kant, Lonergan und der christliche Glaube (Nordhausen: Bautz, 2005), ed. by Ulrich L. Lehner and Ronald K. Tacelli
- Schopenhauer, Arthur. Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung. Erster Band. Anhang. Kritik der Kantischen Philosophie. F. A. Brockhaus, Leipzig 1859 (In English: Arthur Schopenhauer, New York: Dover Press, Volume I, Appendix, "Criticism of the Kantian Philosophy", ISBN 0-486-21761-2)
- Seung, T. K. Kant's Transcendental Logic. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1969.
- Sgarbi, Marco. La Kritik der reinen Vernunft nel contesto della tradizione logica aristotelica, Hildesheim, Olms 2010
- Strawson, P.F. The Bounds of Sense: an essay on Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Routledge, 1989. (work that revitalized the interest of contemporary analytic philosophers in Kant)
- Wolff, Robert Paul. Kant's Theory of Mental Activity: a Commentary on the Transcendental Analytic of the Critique of Pure Reason. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1963. (detailed and influential commentary on the first part of the Critique of Pure Reason)
- Yovel, Yirmiahu. Kant and the Philosophy of History. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1980. (review)
Practical philosophy[link]
- Allison, Henry, Kant's theory of freedom Cambridge University Press 1990.
- Banham, Gary. Kant's Practical Philosophy: From Critique to Doctrine Palgrave Macmillan, 2003.
- Koorsgaard, Christine M. The Sources of Normativity Cambridge University Press, 1996.
- Michalson, Gordon E. Fallen Freedom: Kant on Radical Evil and Moral Regeneration. Cambridge University Press, 1990.
- Michalson, Gordon E. Kant and the Problem of God. Blackwell Publishers, 1999.
- Paton, H. J. The Categorical Imperative; a study in Kant's moral philosophy University of Pennsylvania Press 1971.
- Rawls, John. Lectures on the History of Moral Philosophy. Cambridge, 2000.
- Seung, T.K. Kant's Platonic Revolution in Moral and Political Philosophy. Johns Hopkins, 1994.
- Wolff, Robert Paul. The Autonomy of Reason: A Commentary on Kant's Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals. New York: HarperCollins, 1974. ISBN 0-06-131792-6.
- Wood, Allen. Kant's Ethical Thought New York: Cambridge University Press: 1999.
Aesthetics[link]
- Allison, Henry. Kant's Theory of Taste: A Reading of the Critique of Aesthetic Judgment. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001.
- Banham, Gary. Kant and the Ends of Aesthetics. London and New York: Macmillan Press, 2000.
- Clewis, Robert. The Kantian Sublime and the Revelation of Freedom. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2009.
- Crawford, Donald. Kant's Aesthetic Theory. Wisconsin, 1974.
- Guyer, Paul. Kant and the Claims of Taste. Cambridge, MA and London, 1979.
- Hammermeister, Kai. The German Aesthetic Tradition. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
- Immanuel Kant entry in Kelly, Michael (Editor in Chief) (1998) Encyclopedia of Aesthetics. New York, Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Makkreel, Rudolf, Imagination and Interpretation in Kant. Chicago, 1990.
- McCloskey, Mary. Kant's Aesthetic. SUNY, 1987.
- Schaper, Eva. Studies in Kant's Aesthetics. Edinburgh, 1979.
- Zammito, John H. The Genesis of Kant's Critique of Judgment. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press, 1992.
- Zupancic, Alenka. Ethics of the Real: Kant and Lacan. Verso, 2000.
Philosophy of religion[link]
- Palmquist, Stephen. Kant's Critical Religion: Volume Two of Kant's System of Perspectives. Ashgate, 2000. ISBN 0-7546-1333-X
- Perez, Daniel Omar. "Religión, Política y Medicina en Kant: El Conflicto de las Proposiciones". Cinta de Moebio. Revista de Epistemologia de Ciencias Sociales, v. 28, p. 91-103, 2007. Uchile.cl (Spanish)
Other work[link]
- White, Mark D. Kantian Ethics and Economics: Autonomy, Dignity, and Character. Stanford University Press, 2011. ISBN 978-0-8047-6894-8. (Reviewed in The Montreal Review)
- Braver, Lee. A Thing of This World: a History of Continental Anti-Realism. Northwestern University Press: 2007. ISBN 978-0-8101-2380-9 (This study covers Kant and his contribution to the history of Continental Anti-Realism)
- Caygill, Howard. A Kant Dictionary. Oxford, UK; Cambridge, Mass., US: Blackwell Reference, 1995. ISBN 0-631-17534-2, ISBN 0-631-17535-0
- Derrida, Jacques. Mochlos; or, The Conflict of the Faculties. Columbia University, 1980.
- Mosser, Kurt. Necessity and Possibility; The Logical Strategy of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason. Catholic University of America Press, 2008. ISBN 978-0-8132-1532-7
- Perez, D. O. . Os significados dos conceitos de hospitalidade em Kant e a problemática do estrangeiro. Revista Philosophica (Chile), v. 31, p. 43-53, 2007. Também em Konvergencias, 2007, nro. 15. UCV.cl, Konvergencias.net
- Perez, D. O. A loucura como questão semântica:uma interpretação kantiana. Trans/Form/Ação, São Paulo, 32(1): 95-117, 2009. Scielo.br
Contemporary philosophy with a Kantian influence[link]
- Guyer, Paul. Kant and The Claims of Taste. Harvard University Press, 1979. 2nd Edition, Cambridge University Press, 1997.
- Guyer, Paul. Kant and The Claims of Knowledge. Cambridge University Press, 1987.
- Guyer, Paul. Knowledge, Reason, and Taste: Kant's Response to Hume. Princeton University Press, 2008.
- Herman, Barbara. The Practice of Moral Judgement. Harvard University Press, 1993.
- Korsgaard, Christine. Creating the Kingdom of Ends. Cambridge; New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, 1996. ISBN 0-521-49644-6, ISBN 0-521-49962-3 (pbk.) (not a commentary, but a defense of a broadly Kantian approach to ethics)
- McDowell, John. Mind and World. Harvard University Press, 1994. ISBN 0-674-57609-8. (offers a Kantian solution to a dilemma in contemporary epistemology regarding the relation between mind and world)
- Parfit, Derek. On What Matters (2 vols). New York: Oxford University Press, 2011. ISBN ISBN 978-0-19-926592-3
- Pinker, Steven. The Stuff of Thought. Viking Press, 2007. ISBN 978-0-670-06327-7. (Chapter 4 "Cleaving the Air" discusses Kant's anticipation of modern cognitive science)
- Wood, Allen. Kant's Ethical Thought. Cambridge; New York, NY, US: Cambridge University Press, 1999. ISBN 0-521-64836-X. (comprehensive, in-depth study of Kant's ethics, with emphasis on formula of humanity as most accurate formulation of the categorical imperative)
External links[link]
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Wikisource has original works written by or about: |
- Works by Immanuel Kant at Project Gutenberg
- Works by or about Immanuel Kant in libraries (WorldCat catalog)
- (More German works at Wikisource)
- (More German works at Project Gutenberg)
- (More English works at The University of Adelaide Library)
- Digital edition of Kant's Collected Works, vols. 1-23 in German
- Works by Immanuel Kant in audio format from LibriVox
- Stephen Palmquist's Glossary of Kantian Terminology
- Kant's Categories as grammatical reifications
- Kant's Ethical Theory Kantian ethics explained, applied and evaluated
- Kant & Ethics Extensive links and discussions from Lawrence Hinman at University of San Diego
- Notes on Deontology A conveniently brief survey of Kant's deontology
- Kant on the Web on Stephen Palmquist's website
- Kant Links
- Kant Can: Allen Wood Clears A Path To Kants Complex Philosophies
- Kant's Epistemology and Metaphysics according to the Friesian school
- German Idealist Foundations of Durkheim's Sociology and Teleology of Knowledge
- Several Kant's works in clickable pdf
- Routledge Encyclopedia of Philosophy (14 sections on Kant)
- International Kant Interview - 2004
- Readable versions of Prolegomena, Groundwork for the Metaphysic of Morals, Critique of Pure Reason, Metaphysical Foundations of Natural Science, The Form and Principles of the Sensible and Intelligible World, and Perpetual Peace. (J. Bennett translations)
- Kant's moral philosophy and the question of pre-emptive war, Revue Sens Public
- Kant in the Classroom background information for Kant's lectures
- Works: text, concordances and frequency list
- Kant's Death Mask
- The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy has several entries on Kant:
- Immanuel Kant
- Kant's Philosophical Development
- Kant's Critique of Metaphysics
- Kant's Theory of Judgment
- Kant's Philosophy of Science
- Kant's View of the Mind and Consciousness of Self
- Kant's Aesthetics and Teleology
- Kant's Philosophy of Religion
- Kant's Moral Philosophy
- Kant and Leibniz
| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Kant, Immanuel |
| Alternative names | Kant, Emanuel |
| Short description | German philosopher |
| Date of birth | 1724-4-22 |
| Place of birth | Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia |
| Date of death | 1804-2-12 |
| Place of death | Königsberg, Kingdom of Prussia |
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For other uses, see Emanuel (disambiguation).
Immanuel (or Emmanuel or Imanu'el, Hebrew עִמָּנוּאֵל meaning "God is with us") is a symbolic name which appears in chapters 7 and 8 of the Book of Isaiah as part of a prophecy assuring king Ahaz of Judah of God's protection against enemy kings; it is quoted in the Gospel of Matthew as a sign verifying the divine status of Jesus. It is a theophoric (a name which contains the name of a god) made up of two Hebrew words, אֵל, ’El, meaning "God", and עִמָּנוּ, ʻImmānū, meaning "with us".
Contents |
Isaiah 7-8[link]
Context[link]
The Book of Isaiah was not written by a single author at a single point in time, but rather had a long and complex history. The core was the sayings of the 8th century prophet Isaiah, but chapters 1-55 are most probably the work of an unknown 6th century author who took the words of the historical Isaiah (which had already been edited, most notably during the reign of king Josiah in the later 7th century), and reworked them for his own situation in the Babylonian exile, adding substantial material of his own.[1]
Isaiah 7:1-8:15, although set in the time of king Ahaz, apparently dates from the reign of Ahaz's son Hezekiah some thirty years later, and its purpose was to persuade Hezekiah not to join with other kings who intended to rebel against their joint overlord, Assyria. Isaiah points to the dreadful consequences that followed for Judah's northern neighbours, the kingdom of Israel and Aram-Damascus (Syria) when they rebelled in the days of Ahaz and brought the Assyrians down on themselves. In the event Hezekiah ignored Isaiah and joined the rebels, and the prophet's warning was vindicated: the Assyrians ravaged Judah and Hezekiah barely escaped wityh his throne. A century later, in the time of Josiah, the prophecy was revised to present Ahaz as the faithless king who rejected God's promise of protection for Jerusalem and the house of David, with the result that God brought Assyria to devastate the land until a new and faithful king (presumably Josiah) would arise.[2]
The Immanuel prophecy: summary[link]
The setting is the Syro-Ephraimite War, 734 BCE, which saw Judah pitted against two northern neighbours, Israel (called Ephraim in the prophecy) and Syria (also known as Aram or Aram-Damascus or Syria-Damascus). Isaiah 7:1-2 tells how the kings of Ephraim and Syria attack Jerusalem when Ahaz refuses to join them in their anti-Assyrian alliance. Ahaz wishes to ask Assyria for help, but Isaiah, at God's command, takes his son Shear-jashub (a symbolic name meaning "a remnant shall return") and assures Ahaz that the two enemy kings will not succeed (Isaiah 7:3-9). Isaiah tells Ahaz of the sign by which he will know that this is a true prophecy: a young woman will give birth to a child whom she will name Immanuel (another symbolic name, meaning "God is with us"), and the lands of the enemy will be laid waste before the child is old enough to "reject the wrong and chose the right" (Isaiah 7:13-16). Isaiah 7:17 follows with a further prophecy that at some unspecified future date God will call up Assyria against Judah: "The Lord will cause to come upon you and your people and your ancestral house such days as have not been seen since Ephraim broke away from Judah - the king of Assyria" (verse 7:17). Verses 18-25 describe the desolation that will result: "In that day a man will save alive a young cow and two sheep ... in that day every place where there used to be a thousand vines ... will be turned over to thorns and briars" (verses 21-23).[3] Isaiah 8:1-15 continues the previous chapter: the prophet tells of the birth of another child, his own son named Maher-shalal-hash-baz (yet another symbolic name), then predicts that after Ephraim and Syria are destroyed the Assyrians will come like a river in flood to "cover the breadth of your land, Immanuel" (Isaiah 8:8).[4]
Interpretation[link]
Isaiah 7-8 mentions three children with symbolic names: Shear-jashub, meaning "a remnant shall return"; Immanuel, "God is with us"; and Maher-shalal-hash-baz, "the spoil speeds, the prey hastens".[5] Isaiah 8:18 informs the reader that Isaiah and his children are signs ("Here am I, and the children the Lord has given me. We are signs and symbols in Israel from the Lord Almighty, who dwells on Mount Zion"). The meaning of these name-signs is not clear: Shear-jashub has been variously interpreted to mean that only a remnant of Ephraim and Syria will survive the Assyrian invasion, or that a remnant of Judah will repent and turn to God, while in Isaiah 10:20-23 it seems to mean that a remnant of Israel will return to the Davidic monarchy.[6] Maher-shalal-hash-baz is more clearly related to the expected destruction of Ephraim and Syria. As for Immanuel, "God is with us", Isaiah might mean simply that any young pregnant woman in 734 BCE would be able to name her child "God is with us" by the time he is born; but if a specific child is meant, then it might be a son of Ahaz, possibly his successor Hezekiah (which is the traditional Jewish understanding); or, since the other symbolic children are Isaiah's, Immanuel might be the prophet's own son.[6] However this may be, the significance of the sign changes, from Isaiah 7, where Immanuel symbolises the hope of imminent defeat for Syria and Ephraim, to Isaiah 8:8, where Immanuel is addressed as the people whose land is about to be overrun by the Assyrians.[4]
Matthew 1:22-23[link]
The Gospel of Matthew begins with a genealogy from Abraham through David to Joseph, establishing Joseph as the "son of David", the rightful heir to Judah. But verse 1:16 makes clear that Jesus is not Joseph's son, and Matthew is careful never to refer to Joseph as Jesus's father. Verses 1:18-25 turn to Mary, the future mother of Jesus, betrothed (engaged) to Joseph, but "found to be pregnant through the Holy Spirit" before she and Joseph have "come together". Joseph is about to break the engagement, but an angel appears to him in a dream and tells him of the child's divine origins, and Matthew 1:22-23 explains how this is the fulfillment of Scripture: "All this happened to fulfill what had been declared by the Lord through the prophet, who said, 'Look, the virgin will become pregnant and will give birth to a son, and they will give him the name Immanuel' - which is translated, 'God with us'".[7]
It was common in Jewish writing of the time to reinterpret the scriptures in order to signify a new meaning.[8] This is what Matthew has done with Isaiah 7:14: the Hebrew has the child being given the name Immanuel by "she" (presumably its mother), while the commonly-used Greek translation of the time (the Septuagint) has "you" (presumably king Ahaz, to whom the prophecy was addressed). The change from "she" or "you" to "they" allows Matthew to have Joseph give the name "Jesus" to the child, thus signalling the God-born Messiah's formal adoption into the House of David, while at the same time he is "Immanuel", God with us, the Son of God.[9]
The gospel of Matthew was probably written in the last two decades of the 1st century, not by Matthew the companion of Jesus but by a highly educated Jew who believed that Jesus was the promised Messiah, "God with us".[10][11] At first, titles such as "Messiah" and "son of God" had described Jesus's future nature at the "parousia", the Second Coming; but very soon he came to be recognised as having become the Son of God at the resurrection; then, in Mark, he becomes Son of God at his baptism; and finally Matthew and Luke add infancy narratives in which Jesus is the Son of God from the very beginning, conceived of a virgin mother without a human father.[12]
See also[link]
References[link]
- ^ Barker 2001, p. 489-490.
- ^ Sweeney 1996, p. 159.
- ^ Childs 2001, p. 61.
- ^ a b Finlay 2005, p. 173.
- ^ Barker 1996, p. 506.
- ^ a b Finlay 2005, p. 178-179.
- ^ France 2007, p. 46-47.
- ^ White 2010, p. 244-245.
- ^ France 2007, p. 49.
- ^ Burkett 2001, p. 74.
- ^ Brown 2001, p. 1002.
- ^ Loewe 1996, p. 184.
Bibliography[link]
- Barker, Margaret (2001). "Isaiah". In Dunn, James D.G.; Rogerson, John. Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible. Eerdmans. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=2Vo-11umIZQC&pg=PA489&dq=margaret+barker+Isaiah&hl=en&sa=X&ei=FTKRT8igBM2ZmQX3kOHVAQ&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=margaret%20barker%20Isaiah&f=false.
- Blenkinsopp, Joseph (1996). A History of Prophecy in Israel. Westminster John Knox Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=6P9YEd9lXeAC&pg=PA97&dq=Blenkinsopp+Isaiah+of+Jerusalem&hl=en&sa=X&ei=a1GeT8L0Kob4mAW6tqmmDg&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Blenkinsopp%20Isaiah%20of%20Jerusalem&f=false.
- Brown, Raymond E.; Fitzmyer, Joseph A.; Donfried, Karl Paul (1978). "Gospel of Matthew". Mary in the New Testament. Paulist Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=ML1mnUBwmhcC&pg=PA261&dq=raymond+brown+mary+in+the+testament&hl=en&sa=X&ei=d0OfT9rqA-GpiAekpKz7Dw&ved=0CDgQ6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q=Emmanuel&f=false.
- Burkett, Delbert (2002). An introduction to the New Testament and the origins of Christianity. Cambridge University Press. ISBN 978-0521007207. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=EcsQknxV-xQC&printsec=frontcover&dq=An+introduction+to+the+New+Testament+and+the+origins+of+Christianity+Delbert+Royce+Burkett#v=onepage&q=Gospel%20of%20Matthew&f=false.
- Childs, Brevard S (1996). Isaiah. Westminster John Knox Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=yTxixTkYagoC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Childs,+Brevard+S.++Isaiah&source=bl&ots=OJQOHRw1Ou&sig=IMMKve1mV6k2k8cPDEScFptZyKU&hl=en&ei=BlecTNDFDdKWceT24PMJ&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=3&ved=0CCUQ6AEwAg#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- Coogan, Michael D. (2007). "Isaiah". In Coogan, Michael D.; Brettler, Mark Zvi; Newsom, Carol Ann. New Oxford Annotated Bible. Oxford University Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=Nc-i_pQsiW8C&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+New+Oxford+Annotated+Bible&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rtyUT4bMNcHmmAWm4pTpAQ&ved=0CDkQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20New%20Oxford%20Annotated%20Bible&f=false.
- Duling, Dennis C (2010). "The Gospel of Matthew". In Aune, David E.. The Blackwell companion to the New Testament. Wiley-Blackwell. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=ygcgn8h-jo4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=Blackwell+companion+to+the+New+Testament#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- Ehrman, Bart D. (1999). Jesus: Apocalyptic Prophet of the New Millennium. Oxford University Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=c9K_6NN3llcC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Jesus:+Apocalyptic+Prophet+of+the+New+Millennium&hl=en&sa=X&ei=ZSSRT5-SELGfmQXage3MAQ&ved=0CDYQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Jesus%3A%20Apocalyptic%20Prophet%20of%20the%20New%20Millennium&f=false.
- Finlay, Timothy D. (2005). The Birth Report Genre in the Hebrew Bible. Mohr Siebeck. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=pOigG8qtC8oC&printsec=frontcover&dq=The+Birth+Report+Genre+in+the+Hebrew+Bible&hl=en&sa=X&ei=d3-fT8eUI8bGmQXQw_DsAQ&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Birth%20Report%20Genre%20in%20the%20Hebrew%20Bible&f=false.
- France, R.T. (2007). The Gospel of Matthew. Eerdmans. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=0ruP6J_XPCEC&pg=PA11&lpg=PA11&dq=R.+T.+France+The+Gospel+of+Matthew#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- Keener, Craig S. (1999). A Commentary on the Gospel of Matthew. Eerdmans. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=sWzhEdBZOp4C&printsec=frontcover&dq=commentary+matthew&hl=en&sa=X&ei=LLqhT_fqF4_MmAWN5sX-Bw&ved=0CDUQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=immanuel&f=false.
- Loewe, William P. (1996). The College Student's Introduction to Christology. Liturgical Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=o7e1PCoH1dIC&pg=PA184&dq=infancy+narrative+of+Jesus&hl=en&sa=X&ei=E5KjT_nbMsjbmAWltbjlDg&ved=0CE4Q6AEwBQ#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- Rhodes, Ron (2009). The Complete Guide to Bible Translations. Harvest House Publishers. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=NfI6sgyzq4YC&pg=PA81&dq=translation+of+almah+in+christian+bibles&hl=en&sa=X&ei=rGeWT7bDG6L5mAXg07itDg&ved=0CE8Q6AEwAQ#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- Saldarini, Anthony J. (2001). "Matthew". In Dunn, James D.G.; Rogerson, John. Eerdmans Commentary on the Bible. Eerdmans. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=2Vo-11umIZQC&pg=PA1000&dq=Matthew+Anthony+J+Saldarini+Introduction&hl=en&sa=X&ei=-yyXT-DJKsWhmQWshNjHDg&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Matthew%20Anthony%20J%20Saldarini%20Introduction&f=false.
- Sweeney, Marvin A (1996). Isaiah 1–39: with an introduction to prophetic literature. Eerdmans. http://books.google.com/books?id=BdSzj9-SZv0C&pg=PR3&cad=3#v=onepage&q&f=false.
- Sweeney, Marvin A (2001). King Josiah of Judah: the lost Messiah of Israel. Oxford University Press. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=diPXx_t4IwAC&pg=PA182&dq=Sweeney+prophetic+literature+and+Josiah%27s+reign&hl=en&sa=X&ei=QSueT9iIJcLGmQWCn4SaDg&ved=0CDMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Sweeney%20prophetic%20literature%20and%20Josiah%27s%20reign&f=false.
- Tremmel, Robert (2011). The Four Gospels. Xlibris Corporation. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=oAqX2e7--7YC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Tremmel+The+Four+Gospels&hl=en&sa=X&ei=IsWjT7z-Haq0iQe5yuSNCQ&ved=0CDoQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Tremmel%20The%20Four%20Gospels&f=false.
- White, L. Michael (2010). Scripting Jesus: The Gospels in Rewrite. HarperCollins. http://books.google.com.au/books?id=kJIhXqNwIIUC&pg=PA244&dq=The+Matthean+Theme+of+prophecy+and+fulfillment&hl=en&sa=X&ei=htCjT_TzEdCZiQei-5StCA&ved=0CD0Q6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=The%20Matthean%20Theme%20of%20prophecy%20and%20fulfillment&f=false.
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
For other people named David Hume, see David Hume (disambiguation).
 David Hume |
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| Born | (1711-05-07)7 May 1711 Edinburgh, Scotland |
|---|---|
| Died | 25 August 1776(1776-08-25) (aged 65) Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Era | 18th-century philosophy |
| Region | Western Philosophy |
| School | Scottish Enlightenment; Naturalism, Skepticism, Empiricism, Utilitarianism, Classical liberalism |
| Main interests | Epistemology, Metaphysics, Philosophy of Mind, Ethics, Political Philosophy, Aesthetics, Philosophy of Religion, Classical Economics |
| Notable ideas | Problem of causation, Bundle theory, Induction, Association of ideas, Is–ought problem, Utility, Science of man |
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Influenced by
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Influenced
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David Hume (7 May [O.S. 26 April] 1711 – 25 August 1776) was a Scottish philosopher, historian, economist, and essayist, known especially for his philosophical empiricism and scepticism. He was one of the most important figures in the history of Western philosophy and the Scottish Enlightenment.[1] Hume is often grouped with John Locke, George Berkeley, and a handful of others as a British Empiricist.[2]
Beginning with his A Treatise of Human Nature (1739), Hume strove to create a total naturalistic "science of man" that examined the psychological basis of human nature. In stark opposition to the rationalists who preceded him, most notably Descartes, he concluded that desire rather than reason governed human behaviour, saying: "Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions."[3] A prominent figure in the sceptical philosophical tradition and a strong empiricist, he argued against the existence of innate ideas, concluding instead that humans have knowledge only of things they directly experience. Thus he divides perceptions between strong and lively "impressions" or direct sensations and fainter "ideas", which are copied from impressions. He developed the position that mental behaviour is governed by "custom"; our use of induction, for example, is justified only by our idea of the "constant conjunction" of causes and effects. Without direct impressions of a metaphysical "self", he concluded that humans have no actual conception of the self, only of a bundle of sensations associated with the self.
Hume advocated a compatibilist theory of free will that proved extremely influential on subsequent moral philosophy. He was also a sentimentalist who held that ethics are based on feelings rather than abstract moral principles. Hume also examined the normative is–ought problem. He held notoriously ambiguous views of Christianity,[4] but famously challenged the argument from design in his Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1777).
Kant credited Hume with waking him up from his "dogmatic slumbers" and Hume has proved extremely influential on subsequent philosophy, especially on utilitarianism, logical positivism, William James, philosophy of science, early analytic philosophy, cognitive philosophy, and other movements and thinkers. The philosopher Jerry Fodor proclaimed Hume's Treatise "the founding document of cognitive science".[5] Also famous as a prose stylist,[6] Hume pioneered the essay as a literary genre and engaged with contemporary intellectual luminaries such as Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Adam Smith (who acknowledged Hume's influence on his economics and political philosophy), James Boswell, Joseph Butler, and Thomas Reid.
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Life[link]
David Hume, originally David Home, son of Joseph Home of Chirnside, advocate, and Katherine Falconer, was born on 26 April 1711 (Old Style) in a tenement on the north side of the Lawnmarket in Edinburgh. He changed his name in 1734 because the English had difficulty pronouncing 'Home' in the Scottish manner. Throughout his life Hume, who never married, spent time occasionally at his family home at Ninewells by Chirnside, Berwickshire.
Education[link]
Hume attended the University of Edinburgh at the unusually early age of twelve (possibly as young as ten) at a time when fourteen was normal. At first he considered a career in law, but came to have, in his words, "an insurmountable aversion to everything but the pursuits of Philosophy and general Learning; and while [my family] fanceyed I was poring over Voet and Vinnius, Cicero and Virgil were the Authors which I was secretly devouring."[7] He had little respect for the professors of his time, telling a friend in 1735, "there is nothing to be learnt from a Professor, which is not to be met with in Books."[8]
Hume made a philosophical discovery that opened up to him "...a new Scene of Thought," which inspired him "...to throw up every other Pleasure or Business to apply entirely to it."[9] He did not recount what this "Scene" was, and commentators have offered a variety of speculations.[10] Due to this inspiration, Hume set out to spend a minimum of ten years reading and writing. He came to the verge of nervous breakdown, after which he decided to have a more active life to better continue his learning.[11]
Career[link]
As Hume's options lay between a travelling tutorship and a stool in a merchant's office, he chose the latter. In 1734, after a few months occupied with commerce in Bristol, he went to La Flèche in Anjou, France. There he had frequent discourse with the Jesuits of the College of La Flèche. As he had spent most of his savings during his four years there while writing A Treatise of Human Nature,[11] he resolved "to make a very rigid frugality supply my deficiency of fortune, to maintain unimpaired my independency, and to regard every object as contemptible except the improvements of my talents in literature".[12] He completed the Treatise at the age of 26.
Although many scholars today consider the Treatise to be Hume's most important work and one of the most important books in Western philosophy, the critics in Great Britain at the time did not agree, describing it as "abstract and unintelligible".[13] Despite the disappointment, Hume later wrote, "Being naturally of a cheerful and sanguine temper, I soon recovered from the blow and prosecuted with great ardour my studies in the country".[12] There, he wrote the Abstract[14] Without revealing his authorship, he aimed to make his larger work more intelligible.
After the publication of Essays Moral and Political in 1744, Hume applied for the Chair of Pneumatics and Moral Philosophy at the University of Edinburgh. However, the position was given to William Cleghorn, after Edinburgh ministers petitioned the town council not to appoint Hume because he was seen as an atheist.[15]
During the 1745 Jacobite Rebellion, Hume tutored the Marquis of Annandale (1720–92), who was officially described as a "lunatic".[16] This engagement ended in disarray after about a year. But it was then that Hume started his great historical work The History of England, which took fifteen years and ran over a million words, to be published in six volumes in the period between 1754 and 1762, while also involved with the Canongate Theatre. In this context, he associated with Lord Monboddo and other Scottish Enlightenment luminaries in Edinburgh. From 1746, Hume served for three years as Secretary to Lieutenant-General St Clair, and wrote Philosophical Essays Concerning Human Understanding, later published as An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding. The Enquiry proved little more successful than the Treatise.
Hume was charged with heresy, but he was defended by his young clerical friends, who argued that—as an atheist—he was outside the Church's jurisdiction. Despite his acquittal, Hume failed to gain the Chair of Philosophy at the University of Glasgow.
It was after returning to Edinburgh in 1752, as he wrote in My Own Life, that "the Faculty of Advocates chose me their Librarian, an office from which I received little or no emolument, but which gave me the command of a large library".[17] This resource enabled him to continue historical research for The History of England.
Hume achieved great literary fame as a historian. His enormous The History of England, tracing events from the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688, was a best-seller in its day. In it, Hume presented political person as a creature of habit, with a disposition to submit quietly to established government unless confronted by uncertain circumstances. In his view, only religious difference could deflect people from their everyday lives to think about political matters.
Hume's volume of Political Discourses (published by Kincaid & Donaldson, 1752)[18] was the only work he considered successful on first publication.[19]
Religion[link]
Hume wrote a great deal on religion. The question of what were Hume's personal views on religion is a difficult one.[20] The Church of Scotland seriously considered bringing charges of infidelity against him.[21]
In works such as On Superstition and Enthusiasm, Hume specifically seems to support the standard religious views of his time and place. This still meant that he could be very critical of the Catholic Church, referring to it with the standard Protestant epithets and descriptions of it as superstition and idolatry[22] as well as dismissing what his compatriots saw as uncivilised beliefs.[23] He also considered extreme Protestant sects, which he called enthusiasts, to be corrupters of religion.[24] Yet he also put forward arguments that suggested that polytheism had much to commend it in preference to monotheism.[25]
It is likely that Hume was sceptical both about religious belief (at least as demanded by the religious organisations of his time) and of the complete atheism promoted by such contemporaries as Baron d'Holbach. Paul Russell suggests that perhaps Hume's position is best characterised by the term "irreligion".[26] O'Connor (2001, p19) writes that Hume "did not believe in the God of standard theism. ... but he did not rule out all concepts of deity". Also, "ambiguity suited his purposes, and this creates difficulty in definitively pinning down his final position on religion". When asked if he was an atheist, Hume would say he did not have enough faith to believe there was no god.
The perception of Hume as an atheist with an axe to grind is an oversimplification and contrasts his views on extremist positioning. Hanvelt dubs Hume as an Aristotelian in his view that rhetoric is a form of ethical studies, which ultimately make it political.[27]
Later life[link]
From 1763 to 1765, Hume was Secretary to Lord Hertford in Paris. He met and later fell out with Jean-Jacques Rousseau. He wrote of his Paris life, "I really wish often for the plain roughness of The Poker Club of Edinburgh ... to correct and qualify so much lusciousness".[28] For a year from 1767, Hume held the appointment of Under Secretary of State for the Northern Department. In 1768, he settled in Edinburgh; he lived from 1771 until his death in 1776 at the south-west corner of St. Andrew's Square, in Edinburgh's New Town, at what is now 21 Saint David Street. (A popular story, consistent with some historical evidence,[29] suggests the street was named after Hume.)
James Boswell saw Hume a few weeks before his death (which was from some form of abdominal cancer). Hume told him he sincerely believed it a "most unreasonable fancy" that there might be life after death.[30] This meeting was dramatized in semi-fictional form for the BBC by Michael Ignatieff as Dialogue in the Dark. Hume asked that he be interred in a "simple roman tomb"; in his will he requests that it be inscribed only with his name and the year of his birth and death, "leaving it to Posterity to add the Rest."[31] It stands, as he wished it, on the south-western slope of Calton Hill, in the Old Calton Cemetery.
Hume's "Science of man"[link]
In the introduction to A Treatise of Human Nature, Hume writes "'Tis evident, that all the sciences have a relation, more or less, to human nature ... Even Mathematics, Natural Philosophy, and Natural Religion, are in some measure dependent on the science of Man". Also, "the science of man is the only solid foundation for the other sciences", and the method for this science assumes "experience and observation" as the foundations of a logical argument.[32] Because "Hume's plan is to extend to philosophy in general the methodological limitations of Newtonian physics",[33] Hume is characterised as an empiricist.
Until recently, Hume was seen as a forerunner of the logical positivist movement; a form of anti-metaphysical empiricism. According to the logical positivists, unless a statement could be verified by experience, or else was true or false by definition (i.e. either tautological or contradictory), then it was meaningless (this is a summary statement of their verification principle). Hume, on this view, was a proto-positivist, who, in his philosophical writings, attempted to demonstrate how ordinary propositions about objects, causal relations, the self, and so on, are semantically equivalent to propositions about one's experiences.[34]
Many commentators have since rejected this understanding of Humean empiricism, stressing an epistemological, rather than a semantic reading of his project.[35] According to this view, Hume's empiricism consisted in the idea that it is our knowledge, and not our ability to conceive, that is restricted to what can be experienced. To be sure, Hume thought that we can form beliefs about that which extends beyond any possible experience, through the operation of faculties such as custom and the imagination, but he was skeptical about claims to knowledge on this basis.
Induction[link]
Few philosophers are as associated with induction as David Hume; but Hume himself rarely used the term and when he did, he used it to support a point he was arguing.[36] He gave no indication that he saw any problem with induction.[37] Induction became associated with Hume only in the early twentieth century; John Maynard Keynes may have been the first to draw the connection.[38] The connection is now standard, but is based on what current scholars mean by "induction", not how Hume used the term in his writings.
The cornerstone of Hume's epistemology is the so-called Problem of Induction. This may be the area of Hume's thought where his scepticism about human powers of reason is most pronounced.[39] Understanding the problem of induction is central to grasping Hume's philosophical system.
The problem concerns the explanation of how we are able to make inductive inferences. Inductive inference is reasoning from the observed behaviour of objects to their behaviour when unobserved; as Hume says, it is a question of how things behave when they go "beyond the present testimony of the senses, and the records of our memory".[40] Hume notices that we tend to believe that things behave in a regular manner; i.e., that patterns in the behaviour of objects will persist into the future, and throughout the unobserved present. This persistence of regularities is sometimes called Uniformitarianism or the Principle of the Uniformity of Nature.
Hume's argument is that we cannot rationally justify the claim that nature will continue to be uniform, as justification comes in only two varieties, and both of these are inadequate. The two sorts are: (1) demonstrative reasoning, and (2) probable reasoning.[41] With regard to (1), Hume argues that the uniformity principle cannot be demonstrated, as it is "consistent and conceivable" that nature might stop being regular.[42] Turning to (2), Hume argues that we cannot hold that nature will continue to be uniform because it has been in the past, as this is using the very sort of reasoning (induction) that is under question: it would be circular reasoning.[43] Thus no form of justification will rationally warrant our inductive inferences.
Hume's solution to this problem is to argue that, rather than reason, natural instinct explains the human ability to make inductive inferences. He asserts that "Nature, by an absolute and uncontroulable [sic] necessity has determin'd us to judge as well as to breathe and feel". Although many modern commentators have demurred from Hume's solution,[44] some have notably concurred with it, seeing his analysis of our epistemic predicament as a major contribution to the theory of knowledge. For example, the Oxford philosopher John D. Kenyon writes:
Reason might manage to raise a doubt about the truth of a conclusion of natural inductive inference just for a moment in the study, but the forces of nature will soon overcome that artificial skepticism, and the sheer agreeableness of animal faith will protect us from excessive caution and sterile suspension of belief.[45]
Causation[link]
The notion of causation is closely linked to the problem of induction. According to Hume, we reason inductively by associating constantly conjoined events, and it is the mental act of association that is the basis of our concept of causation. There are three main interpretations of Hume's theory of causation represented in the literature: (1) the logical positivist; (2) the skeptical realist; and (3) the quasi-realist.
The logical positivist interpretation is that Hume analyses causal propositions, such as "A caused B", in terms of regularities in perception: "A caused B" is equivalent to "Whenever A-type events happen, B-type ones follow", where "whenever" refers to all possible perceptions.[46]
power and necessity... are... qualities of perceptions, not of objects... felt by the soul and not perceived externally in bodies[47]
This view is rejected by sceptical realists, who argue that Hume thought that causation amounts to more than just the regular succession of events.[35] When two events are causally conjoined, a necessary connection underpins the conjunction:
Shall we rest contented with these two relations of contiguity and succession, as affording a complete idea of causation? By no means ... there is a necessary connexion to be taken into consideration.[48]
Hume held that we have no perceptual access to the necessary connection, hence skepticism, but we are naturally compelled to believe in its objective existence, ergo realism. He thus concluded that there are no necessary connections, only constant conjunctions.[49]
Referring to the Law of Causality, Hume wrote, "I never asserted so absurd a proposition as that something could arise without a cause."[50]
It has been argued that, whilst Hume did not think causation is reducible to pure regularity, he was not a fully fledged realist either: Simon Blackburn calls this a quasi-realist reading.[51] On this view, talk about causal necessity is an expression of a functional change in the human mind, whereby certain events are predicted or anticipated on the basis of prior experience. The expression of causal necessity is a "projection" of the functional change onto the objects involved in the causal connection: in Hume's words, "nothing is more usual than to apply to external bodies every internal sensation which they occasion.[52]
The self[link]
According to the standard interpretation of Hume on personal identity, he was a Bundle Theorist, who held that the self is nothing but a bundle of experiences ("perceptions") linked by the relations of causation and resemblance; or, more accurately, that the empirically warranted idea of the self is just the idea of such a bundle. This view is forwarded by, for example, positivist interpreters, who saw Hume as suggesting that terms such as "self", "person", or "mind" referred to collections of "sense-contents".[53] A modern-day version of the bundle theory of the mind has been advanced by Derek Parfit in his Reasons and Persons (1986).
However, some philosophers have criticised the bundle-theory interpretation of Hume on personal identity. They argue that distinct selves can have perceptions that stand in relations of similarity and causality with one another. Thus perceptions must already come parcelled into distinct "bundles" before they can be associated according to the relations of similarity and causality: in other words, the mind must already possess a unity that cannot be generated, or constituted, by these relations alone. Since the bundle-theory interpretation portrays Hume as answering an ontological question, philosophers who see Hume as not very concerned with such questions have queried whether the view is really Hume's,[54] or "only a decoy".[55] Instead, it is suggested, Hume might have been answering an epistemological question, about the causal origin of our concept of the self. In the Appendix to the Treatise, Hume declares himself dissatisfied with his account of the self in Book 1 of the Treatise, and the question of why he is dissatisfied has received a number of different answers.
Another interpretation of Hume's view of the self has been argued for by James Giles.[56] According to this view, Hume is not arguing for a bundle theory, which is a form of reductionism, but rather for an eliminative view of the self. That is, rather than reducing the self to a bundle of perceptions, Hume is rejecting the idea of the self altogether. On this interpretation Hume is proposing a 'No-Self Theory' and thus has much in common with Buddhist thought.[57] Alison Gopnik has argued that Hume was in a position to learn about Buddhist thought during his time in France in the 1730s.[58]
Practical reason[link]
Hume's anti-rationalism informed much of his theory of belief and knowledge, in his treatment of the notions of induction, causation, and the external world. But it was not confined to this sphere, and permeated just as strongly his theories of motivation, action, and morality. In a famous sentence in the Treatise, Hume circumscribes reason's role in the production of action:
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.[59]
It has been suggested that this position can be lucidly brought out through the metaphor of "direction of fit": beliefs—the paradigmatic products of reason—are propositional attitudes that aim to have their content fit the world; conversely, desires—or what Hume calls passions, or sentiments—are states that aim to fit the world to their contents.[60] Though a metaphor, it has been argued that this intuitive way of understanding Hume's theory that desires are necessary for motivation "captures something quite deep in our thought about their nature".[61]
Hume's anti-rationalism has been very influential, and defended in contemporary philosophy of action by neo-Humeans such as Michael Smith[61] and Simon Blackburn.[62] The major opponents of the Humean view are cognitivists about what it is to act for a reason, such as John McDowell,[63] and Kantians, such as Christine Korsgaard.[64]
Ethics[link]
Hume's views on human motivation and action formed the cornerstone of his ethical theory: he conceived moral or ethical sentiments to be intrinsically motivating, or the providers of reasons for action. Given that one cannot be motivated by reason alone, requiring the input of the passions, Hume argued that reason cannot be behind morality.
Morals excite passions, and produce or prevent actions. Reason itself is utterly impotent in this particular. The rules of morality, therefore, are not conclusions of our reason.[65]
Hume's sentimentalism about morality was shared by his close friend Adam Smith,[66] and Hume and Smith were mutually influenced by the moral reflections of Francis Hutcheson.[67]
Hume's theory of ethics has been influential in modern day ethical theory, helping to inspire various forms of emotivism,[68][69] error theory[70] and ethical expressivism and non-cognitivism[71] and Alan Gibbard.[72]
See also: is–ought problem
Free will, determinism, and responsibility[link]
Hume, along with Thomas Hobbes, is cited as a classical compatibilist about the notions of freedom and determinism.[73] The thesis of compatibilism seeks to reconcile human freedom with the mechanist belief that human beings are part of a deterministic universe, whose happenings are governed by the laws of physics.
Hume argued that the dispute about the compatibility of freedom and determinism has been kept afloat by ambiguous terminology:
From this circumstance alone, that a controversy has been long kept on foot... we may presume, that there is some ambiguity in the expression.[74]
Hume defines the concepts of "necessity" and "liberty" as follows:
Necessity: "the uniformity, observable in the operations of nature; where similar objects are constantly conjoined together..".[75]
Liberty: "a power of acting or not acting, according to the determinations of the will..".[76]
Hume then argues that, according to these definitions, not only are the two compatible, but Liberty requires Necessity. For if our actions were not necessitated in the above sense, they would "...have so little in connexion with motives, inclinations and circumstances, that one does not follow with a certain degree of uniformity from the other." But if our actions are not thus hooked up to the will, then our actions can never be free: they would be matters of "chance; which is universally allowed not to exist".[76]
Moreover, Hume goes on to argue that in order to be held morally responsible, it is required that our behaviour be caused, i.e. necessitated, for
Actions are, by their very nature, temporary and perishing; and where they proceed not from some cause in the character and disposition of the person who performed them, they can neither redound to his honour, if good; nor infamy, if evil[77]
This argument has inspired modern day commentators.[78] However, it has been argued that the issue of whether or not we hold one another morally responsible does not ultimately depend on the truth or falsity of a metaphysical thesis such as determinism, for our so holding one another is a non-rational human sentiment that is not predicated on such theses. For this influential argument, which is still made in a Humean vein, see P. F. Strawson's essay, Freedom and Resentment.[79]
Problem of miracles[link]
In his discussion of miracles in An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding (Section 10) Hume defines a miracle as "a transgression of a law of nature by a particular volition of the Deity, or by the interposition of some invisible agent". Given that Hume argues that it is impossible to deduce the existence of a Deity from the existence of the world (for he says that causes cannot be determined from effects), miracles (including prophecy) are the only possible support he would conceivably allow for theistic religions.
Hume discusses everyday belief as often resulted from probability, where we believe an event that has occurred most often as being most likely, but that we also subtract the weighting of the less common event from that of the more common event. In the context of miracles, this means that a miraculous event should be labelled a miracle only where it would be even more unbelievable (by principles of probability) for it not to be. Hume mostly discusses miracles as testimony, of which he writes that when a person reports a miraculous event we [need to] balance our belief in their veracity against our belief that such events do not occur. Following this rule, only where it is considered, as a result of experience, less likely that the testimony is false than that a miracle occur should we believe in miracles.
Although Hume leaves open the possibility for miracles to occur and be reported, he offers various arguments against this ever having happened in history:[80]
- People often lie, and they have good reasons to lie about miracles occurring either because they believe they are doing so for the benefit of their religion or because of the fame that results.
- People by nature enjoy relating miracles they have heard without caring for their veracity and thus miracles are easily transmitted even where false.
- Hume notes that miracles seem to occur mostly in "ignorant" and "barbarous" nations and times, and the reason they don't occur in the "civilized" societies is such societies aren't awed by what they know to be natural events.
- The miracles of each religion argue against all other religions and their miracles, and so even if a proportion of all reported miracles across the world fit Hume's requirement for belief, the miracles of each religion make the other less likely.
Despite all this Hume observes that belief in miracles is popular, and that "The gazing populace receive greedily, without examination, whatever soothes superstition and promotes wonder".[81]
Critics have argued that Hume's position assumes the character of miracles and natural laws prior to any specific examination of miracle claims, and thus it amounts to a subtle form of begging the question. They have also noted that it requires an appeal to inductive inference, as none have observed every part of nature or examined every possible miracle claim (e.g., those yet future to the observer), which in Hume's philosophy was especially problematic.
Hume's main argument concerning miracles is the following. Miracles by definition are singular events that differ from the established Laws of Nature. The Laws of Nature are codified as a result of past experiences. Therefore a miracle is a violation of all prior experience. However the probability that something has occurred in contradiction of all past experience should always be judged to be less than the probability that either my senses have deceived me or the person recounting the miraculous occurrence is lying or mistaken, all of which I have past experience of. For Hume, this refusal to grant credence does not guarantee correctness – he offers the example of an Indian Prince, who having grown up in a hot country refuses to believe that water has frozen. By Hume's lights this refusal is not wrong and the Prince is thinking correctly; it is presumably only when he has had extensive experience of the freezing of water that he has warrant to believe that the event could occur. So for Hume, either the miraculous event will become a recurrent event or else it will never be rational to believe it occurred. The connection to religious belief is left inexplicit throughout, save for the close of his discussion wherein Hume notes the reliance of Christianity upon testimony of miraculous occurrences and makes an ironic[82][83] remark that anyone who "is moved by faith to assent" to revealed testimony "is aware of a continued miracle in his own person, which subverts all principles of his understanding, and gives him a determination to believe what is most contrary to custom and experience."
Design argument[link]
See also: Anthropic principle and Problem of evil
One of the oldest and most popular arguments for the existence of God is the design argument: that order and "purpose" in the world bespeaks a divine origin. Hume argued that for the design argument to be feasible, it must be true that order and purpose are observed only when they result from design. But order is often observed to result from presumably mindless processes like the generation of snowflakes and crystals. Design can account for only a tiny part of our experience of order.
Political theory[link]
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It is difficult to categorize Hume's political affiliations. His thought contains elements that are, in modern terms, both conservative and liberal, as well as ones that are both contractarian and utilitarian, though these terms are all anachronistic. Thomas Jefferson banned Hume's History from the University of Virginia, fearing that it "has spread universal toryism over the land".[84] Yet, Samuel Johnson thought Hume "a Tory by chance... for he has no principle. If he is anything, he is a Hobbist".[85] His central concern is to show the importance of the rule of law, and stresses throughout his political Essays the importance of moderation in politics. This outlook needs to be seen within the historical context of eighteenth century Scotland, where the legacy of religious civil war, combined with the relatively recent memory of the 1715 and 1745 Jacobite risings, fostered in a historian such as Hume a distaste for enthusiasm and factionalism that appeared to threaten the fragile and nascent political and social stability of a country that was deeply politically and religiously divided. He thinks that society is best governed by a general and impartial system of laws, based principally on the "artifice" of contract; he is less concerned about the form of government that administers these laws, so long as it does so fairly (though he thought that republics were more likely to do so than monarchies).
Hume expressed suspicion of attempts to reform society in ways that departed from long-established custom, and he counselled peoples not to resist their governments except in cases of the most egregious tyranny.[86] However, he resisted aligning himself with either of Britain's two political parties, the Whigs and the Tories. Hume writes
My views of things are more conformable to Whig principles; my representations of persons to Tory prejudices.[87]
McArthur says that Hume believed that we should try to balance our demands for liberty with the need for strong authority, without sacrificing either. McArthur characterizes Hume as a 'precautionary conservative': whose actions would have been "determined by prudential concerns about the consequences of change, which often demand we ignore our own principles about what is ideal or even legitimate",[88] He supported liberty of the press, and was sympathetic to democracy, when suitably constrained. Douglass Adair has argued that Hume was a major inspiration for James Madison's writings, and the Federalist No. 10 in particular.[89] Hume was also, in general, an optimist about social progress, believing that, thanks to the economic development that comes with the expansion of trade, societies progress from a state of "barbarism" to one of "civilisation". Civilised societies are open, peaceful and sociable, and their citizens are as a result much happier. It is therefore not fair to characterise him, as Leslie Stephen did, as favouring "...that stagnation which is the natural ideal of a skeptic."[90]
Though it has been suggested Hume had no positive vision of the best society, he in fact produced an essay titled Idea of a Perfect Commonwealth,[91] which lays out what he thought was the best form of government. His pragmatism shone through, however, in his caveat that we should only seek to implement such a system should an opportunity present itself, which would not upset established structures. He defended a strict separation of powers, decentralisation, extending the franchise to anyone who held property of value and limiting the power of the clergy. The Swiss militia system was proposed as the best form of protection. Elections were to take place on an annual basis and representatives were to be unpaid. It is also important to note that the ideal commonwealth laid out by Hume was held to be ideal only for the British Isles in the 18th century. According to Hume "good constitutions... will ensure that the private interest of men, even of bad men, will controlled and directed as to serve and produce the public good. Such is the aim of free government, which Hume calls the "happiest" society... Liberty in the sense of free government is, Hume says, "the perfection of civil society"... The wise statemen... in attempting to improve a constitution will adapt his innovations to the "ancient fabric", so as not to disturb society. His caution may be reiforced by reflections on the limits of human foresight".[92]
Contributions to economic thought[link]
Through his discussions on politics, Hume developed many ideas that are prevalent in the field of economics. This includes ideas on private property, inflation, and foreign trade.[93]
In contrast to Locke, Hume believes that private property isn't a natural right. Hume argues it is justified, because resources are limited. Private property would be an unjustified, "idle ceremonial", if all goods were unlimited and available freely. Hume also believed in an unequal distribution of property, because perfect equality would destroy the ideas of thrift and industry. Perfect equality would thus lead to impoverishment.[94]
As historian of England[link]
In 1754 to 1762 Hume published the History of England, a 6-volume work of immense sweep, which extends, says its subtitle, "From the Invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution in 1688". Inspired by Voltaire's sense of the breadth of history, Hume widened the focus of history, away from merely Kings, Parliaments, and armies, to literature and science as well. He argued that the quest for liberty was the highest standard for judging the past, and concluded that after considerable fluctuation, England at the time of his writing had achieved "the most entire system of liberty, that was ever known amongst mankind."[95]
Hume's coverage of the political upheavals of the 17th century relied in large part on the Earl of Clarendon's History of the Rebellion and Civil Wars in England (1646-69). Generally Hume took a moderate Royalist position and thought revolution was unnecessary. Hume's indeed was considered a Tory history, and emphasized religious differences more than constitutional issues. He was anti-Presbyterian, anti-Puritan, anti-Whig, and pro-monarchy. Historians have debated whether Hume posited a universal unchanging human nature, or allowed for evolution and development.[96]
Hume was an early cultural historian of science. His short biographies of leading scientists explored the process of scientific change. He developed new ways of seeing scientists in the context of their times by looking at how they interacted with society and each other. He covers over 40 scientists, with special attention paid to Francis Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton. Hume awarded the palm of greatness to William Harvey.[97]
The History sold well and was influential for nearly a century when it was superseded by Goldsmith's history (which itself was partly plagiarized from Hume's). By 1894, there were at least 50 editions. There was also an often-reprinted abridgement, The Student's Hume (1859).
Works[link]
- A Kind of History of My Life (1734) Mss 23159 National Library of Scotland. A letter to an unnamed physician, asking for advice about "the Disease of the Learned" that then afflicted him. Here he reports that at the age of eighteen "there seem'd to be open'd up to me a new Scene of Thought..." that made him "throw up every other Pleasure or Business" and turned him to scholarship.[citation needed]
- A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to introduce the experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects. (1739–40) Hume intended to see whether the Treatise of Human Nature met with success, and if so to complete it with books devoted to Politics and Criticism. However, it did not meet with success. As Hume himself said, "It fell dead-born from the press, without reaching such distinction as even to excite a murmur among the zealots"[12] and so was not completed.
- An Abstract of a Book lately Published: Entitled A Treatise of Human Nature etc. (1740) Anonymously published, but almost certainly written by Hume[98] in an attempt to popularise his Treatise. Of considerable philosophical interest, because it spells out what he considered "The Chief Argument" of the Treatise, in a way that seems to anticipate the structure of the Enquiry concerning Human Understanding.
- Essays Moral and Political (first ed. 1741–2) A collection of pieces written and published over many years, though most were collected together in 1753–4. Many of the essays are focused on topics in politics and economics, though they also range over questions of aesthetic judgement, love, marriage and polygamy, and the demographics of ancient Greece and Rome, to name just a few of the topics considered. The Essays show some influence from Addison's Tatler and The Spectator, which Hume read avidly in his youth.
- A Letter from a Gentleman to His Friend in Edinburgh: Containing Some Observations on a Specimen of the Principles concerning Religion and Morality, said to be maintain'd in a Book lately publish'd, intituled A Treatise of Human Nature etc. Edinburgh (1745). Contains a letter written by Hume to defend himself against charges of atheism and scepticism, while applying for a Chair at Edinburgh University.
- An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (1748) Contains reworking of the main points of the Treatise, Book 1, with the addition of material on free will (adapted from Book 2), miracles, the Design Argument, and mitigated scepticism. Of Miracles, section X of the Enquiry, was often published separately,
- An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751) A reworking of material from Book 3 of the Treatise, on morality, but with a significantly different emphasis. Hume regarded this as the best of all his philosophical works,[citation needed] both in its philosophical ideas and in its literary style.
- Political Discourses, (part II of Essays, Moral, Political, and Literary within vol. 1 of the larger Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects) Edinburgh (1752). Included in Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (1753–6) reprinted 1758–77.
- Political Discourses/Discours politiques (1752–1758), My ovn life (1776), Of Essay writing, 1742. Bilingual English-French (translated by Fabien Grandjean). Mauvezin, France, Trans-Europ-Repress, 1993, 22 cm, V-260 p. Bibliographic notes, index.
- Four Dissertations London (1757). Included in reprints of Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects (above).
- The History of England (Sometimes referred to as The History of Great Britain) (1754–62) More a category of books than a single work, Hume's history spanned "from the invasion of Julius Caesar to the Revolution of 1688" and went through over 100 editions. Many considered it the standard history of England until Thomas Macaulay's History of England.
- The Natural History of Religion (1757)
- "My Own Life" (1776) Penned in April, shortly before his death, this autobiography was intended for inclusion in a new edition of "Essays and Treatises on Several Subjects". It was first published by Adam Smith who claimed that by doing so he had incurred "ten times more abuse than the very violent attack I had made upon the whole commercial system of Great Britain".[citation needed] (Ernest Campbell Mossner, The Life of David Hume)
- Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion (1779) Published posthumously by his nephew, David Hume the Younger. Being a discussion among three fictional characters concerning the nature of God, and is an important portrayal of the argument from design. Despite some controversy, most scholars agree that the view of Philo, the most sceptical of the three, comes closest to Hume's own.[99]
Hume's influence[link]
Attention to Hume's philosophical works grew after the German philosopher Immanuel Kant credited Hume with awakening him from "dogmatic slumbers" (circa 1770).[100]
According to Schopenhauer, "there is more to be learned from each page of David Hume than from the collected philosophical works of Hegel, Herbart and Schleiermacher taken together".[101]
A. J. Ayer (1936), introducing his classic exposition of logical positivism, claimed: "The views which are put forward in this treatise derive from the logical outcome of the empiricism of Berkeley and Hume."[102] Albert Einstein (1915) wrote that he was inspired by Hume's positivism when formulating his Special Theory of Relativity.[103] Hume was called "the prophet of the Wittgensteinian revolution" by N. Phillipson, referring to his view that mathematics and logic are closed systems, disguised tautologies, and have no relation to the world of experience.[104] David Fate Norton (1993) asserted that Hume was "the first post-sceptical philosopher of the early modern period".[105]
Hume's Problem of Induction was also of fundamental importance to the philosophy of Karl Popper. In his autobiography, Unended Quest,[106] he wrote: "'Knowledge' ... is objective; and it is hypothetical or conjectural. This way of looking at the problem made it possible for me to reformulate Hume's problem of induction". This insight resulted in Popper's major work The Logic of Scientific Discovery.[107] In his Conjectures and Refutations, p 55, he writes:
"I approached the problem of induction through Hume. Hume, I felt, was perfectly right in pointing out that induction cannot be logically justified".
See also[link]
Further reading[link]
- Ardal, Pall (1966). Passion and Value in Hume's Treatise. Edinburgh, Edinburgh University Press.
- Beauchamp, Tom and Rosenberg, Alexander, Hume and the Problem of Causation New York, Oxford University Press, 1981.
- Ernest Campbell Mossner. The Life of David Hume. Oxford University Press, 1980. (The standard biography.)
- Peter Millican. Critical Survey of the Literature on Hume and his First Enquiry. (Surveys around 250 books and articles on Hume and related topics.) Davidhume.org
- David Fate Norton. David Hume: Commonsense Moralist, Skeptical Metaphysician. Princeton University Press, 1978.
- Garrett, Don (1996). Cognition and Commitment in Hume's Philosophy. New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- J.C.A. Gaskin. Hume's Philosophy of Religion. Humanities Press International, 1978.
- P. J. E. Kail (2007) Projection and Realism in Hume's Philosophy, Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Norman Kemp Smith.The Philosophy of David Hume. Macmillan, 1941. (Still enormously valuable.)
- Frederick Rosen, Classical Utilitarianism from Hume to Mill (Routledge Studies in Ethics & Moral Theory), 2003. ISBN 0-415-22094-7
- Russell, Paul (1995). Freedom and Moral Sentiment: Hume's Way of Naturalizing Responsibility. New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Russell, Paul (2008). The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism and Irreligion New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press.
- Stroud, B. (1977). Hume, Routledge, London & New York. (Complete study of Hume's work parting from the interpretation of Hume's naturalistic philosophical programme).
- Hesselberg, A. Kenneth (1961). Hume, Natural Law and Justice. Duquesne Review
- Gilles Deleuze, Empirisme et subjectivité. Essai sur la Nature Humaine selon Hume (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1953) trans. Empiricism and Subjectivity (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991)
- Fieser, James (2011) . David Hume (1711-1776) University of Tennessee, U. S. A. Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Footnotes[link]
- ^ "Great Thinkers of the Scottish Enlightenment". http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/scottishhistory/enlightenment/features_enlightenment_enlightenment.shtml.
- ^ Margaret Atherton, ed. The Empiricists: Critical Essays on Locke, Berkeley, and Hume. Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999.
- ^ "A Treatise of Human Nature, by David Hume (B2.3.3)". http://www.unc.edu/~jjeffrey/Hume%20Files--start%20with%20B3/B2.3.3.html. Retrieved 22 May 2012.
- ^ Paul Russel (17 May 2010). "Hume on Religion". First published October 4, 2005. The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Winter 2008 Edition). http://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2008/entries/hume-religion. Retrieved 18 September 2010.
- ^ Fodor, Jerry. Hume Variations. New York: Oxford University Press, 2003, p. 134.
- ^ Saintsbury, George, ed. Specimens of English Prose Style: From Malory to Macaulay. London: Macmillan & Co., 1907, p. 196.
- ^ David Hume, My Own Life. In Norton, D. F. (ed.) (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge University Press, p. 351
- ^ In a letter to 'Jemmy' Birch, quoted in Mossner, E. C. (2001). The life of David Hume. Oxford University Press. p. 626
- ^ David Hume, A Kind of History of My Life in D. F. Norton, (ed.) (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, p. 346
- ^ See Oliver A. Johnson, The Mind of David Hume, (University of Illinois Press, 1995), pp. 8–9, for a useful presentation of varying interpretations of Hume's "scene of thought" remark
- ^ a b Mossner, 193
- ^ a b c David Hume, A Kind of History of My Life. In Norton, D. F. (ed.) (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge University Press, p. 352
- ^ Mossner, 195
- ^ An Abstract of a Book lately Published; Entitled, A Treatise of Human Nature, &c. Wherein the Chief Argument of that Book is farther Illustrated and Explained, (London, 1740)
- ^ Douglas Nobbs, 'The Political Ideas of William Cleghorn, Hume's Academic Rival', in Journal of the History of Ideas, (1965), Vol. 26, No. 4: 575–586
- ^ Grant, Old and New Edinburgh in the 18th Century, (Glasgow, 1883), p. 7
- ^ David Hume, The History of Great Britain, (London, 1754–56) p. 353
- ^ Sher, Richard B. (2006). The Enlightenment & the book: Scottish authors & their publishers in eighteenth-century Britain, Ireland, & America. Chicago Studies in Ethnomusicology Series. University of Chicago Press. p. 313. ISBN 0-226-75252-6. http://books.google.com/?id=gB9liJb5o7UC&pg=PA312&dq=%22alexander+donaldson%22+bookstore&q.
- ^ David Hume (1776). My Own Life
- ^ Russell, 2008, O'Connor, 2001, and Norton, 1993
- ^ Mossner, E. C. (2001). The life of David Hume. Oxford University Press. p. 206
- ^ Hume. D. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding "... the gradual progress of the Catholic superstition ..."; and On Superstition and Enthusiasm: "Modern Judaism and popery especially the latter being the most unphilosophical and absurd superstitions which have yet been known in the world ..."
- ^ Hume, D, The Natural History of Religion "... our present experience concerning the principles and opinions of barbarous nations. The savage tribes of America Africa and Asia are all idolaters."
- ^ Hume, D, Of Superstition and Enthusiasm: "the corruption of the best things produces the worsts is grown into a max im and is commonly proved among other instances by the pernicious effects of superstition and enthusiasm the corruptions of true religion." and "... all enthusiasts have been free from the yoke of ecclesiastics and have exprest great independence in their devotion with a contempt of forms ceremonies and traditions. The quakers are the most egregious tho at the same time the most innocent enthusiasts ... The independents of all the English sectaries approach nearest to the quakers in fanaticism and in their freedom from priestly bondage The presbytarians follow after at an equal distance in both these particulars ...
- ^ Hume, D, The Natural History of Religion "... Where the deity is represented as infinitely superior to mankind this belief tho altogether just is apt ... to represent the monkish virtues of mortification penance humility and passive suffering as the only qualities which are acceptable to him. But where the gods are conceived to be only a little superior to mankind and to have been many of them advanced that inferior rank we are more at our ease in our addresses to them and may even without profaneness aspire sometimes to a rivalship and emulation of them."
- ^ Russell, Paul (2008). The Riddle of Hume's Treatise: Skepticism, Naturalism and Irreligion New York & Oxford, Oxford University Press
- ^ Hanvelt, Marc. "Polite Passionate Persuasion: Hume's Conception of Rhetoric." Canadian Journal of Political Science 43.3 (2010): 565-581.
- ^ Mossner, p. 265
- ^ Mossner, Appendix H
- ^ Boswell, J. Boswell in Extremes, 1776–1778
- ^ Mossner, p. 591
- ^ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (New York: Dover, 2003 edition), p. 7
- ^ Copplestone, F., A history of Philosophy, v. 6, 2003
- ^ A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (Penguin, 2001 edition), pp. 40ff
- ^ a b See, e.g.,
- Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man, Ch.2
- Galen Strawson, The Secret Connexion, (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989)
- John Wright, The Sceptical Realism of David Hume, (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1983)
- ^ J. R. Milton. "Induction Before Hume". Handbook of the History of Logic: Volume 10. Elsevier BV. http://stephanhartmann.org/HHL10_Milton.pdf.
- ^ In Treatise on Human Nature, Hume used the word only twice, at 1.2.1.2 and 1.3.7.7. The word does not appear in An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding or An Abstract of a Book Lately Published, Entitled A Treatise of Human Nature. It appears once in An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, at the very beginning, again in a passage indicating Hume saw no problem with induction. For evidence that Hume thought his work was consistent with Francis Bacon's theory of induction, see Hume's full title, A Treatise of Human Nature: Being an Attempt to Introduce the Experimental Method of Reasoning into Moral Subjects, and then Hume's description of the "experimental method" in the introduction to Book 1.
- ^ In the Treatise of Probability of 1921, Keynes wrote, "Hume's sceptical criticisms are usually associated with causality; but argument by induction—inference from past particulars to future generalizations—was the real object of his attack." (p. 272).
- ^ John D. Kenyon, 'Doubts about the Concept of Reason', in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Vol. 59, (1985), 249–267
- ^ Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 108
- ^ These are Hume's terms. In modern parlance, demonstration may be termed deductive reasoning, while probability may be termed inductive reasoning: see Dr. Peter J. R. Millican's. "Hume, Induction and Probability". D.Phil thesis. http://www.davidhume.org/documents/1996PhD.pdf.
- ^ Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 111
- ^ Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 115
- ^ Harris, Errol E. (2004). Hypothesis and Perception: The Roots of Scientific Method. Muirhead Library of Philosophy. 10. Psychology Press. p. 42. ISBN 978-0-415-29615-1. http://books.google.com/books?id=uBbfizzKTDoC&lpg=PA42&pg=PA42.
- ^ John D. Kenyon, 'Doubts about the Concept of Reason', in Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, Vol. 59, (1985), p. 254
- ^ For this account of Hume's views on causation,
- A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (Penguin, 2001 edition), pp. 40–42
- ^ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (New York: Dover, 2003 edition), p. 168
- ^ David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, (New York: Dover, 2003 edition), p. 56
- ^ An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding by David Hume.
- ^ David Hume, in J.Y.T. Greig, ed., The Letters of David Hume, 2 vols. (New York: Garland, 1983), 1:187.
- ^ See S. Blackburn, ‘Hume and Thick Connexions', in Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, Vol. 50, Supplement. (Autumn, 1990), pp. 237–250
- ^ Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 147, fn.17
- ^ For this account of Hume on the self,
- A. J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic, (Penguin, 2001 edition), pp. 135–6
- ^ Galen Strawson, The Evident Connexion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011)DOI: 10.1093/acprof:oso/9780199608508.001.0001
- ^ Edward Craig, The Mind of God and the Works of Man, Ch.2
- ^ James Giles, No Self to be Found: the Search for Personal Identity University Press of America, 1997.
- ^ Giles, James (1993). "The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity". Philosophy East and West 43 (2): 175–200. DOI:10.2307/1399612.
- ^ “Could David Hume Have Known about Buddhism? Charles Francois Dolu, the Royal College of La Flèche, and the Global Jesuit Intellectual Network”, Hume Studies Volume 35, Number 1&2, 2009, pp. 5–28.
- ^ Treatise, p. 295
- ^ The metaphor of direction of fit in this sense has been traced back to Elizabeth Anscombe's work on intention: Intention (2nd Edition), (1963, Oxford: Basil Blackwell)
- ^ a b M. Smith, 'The Humean Theory of Motivation', Mind, New Series, Vol. 96, No. 381 (Jan., 1987), pp. 36–61
- ^ S. Blackburn, 'Practical Tortoise Raising', Mind, New Series, Vol. 104, No. 416 (Oct., 1995), pp. 695–711
- ^ J. McDowell, 'Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following', in S. Holtzman and C. Leich, Wittgenstein: To Follow A Rule, (1981, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul)
- ^ C. Korsgaard, 'Scepticism about Practical Reason', The Journal of Philosophy, Vol. 83, No. 1 (Jan., 1986), pp. 5–25
- ^ Treatise, op. cit., p. 325
- ^ Adam Smith, The Theory of Moral Sentiments (1759), ed. K. Haakonssen, (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002)
- ^ For Hutcheson's influence on Hume, see footnote 7. For his influence on Smith, see William L. Taylor, Francis Hutcheson and David Hume as Predecessors of Adam Smith, (Durham: Duke University Press, 1965)
- ^ A. J. Ayer. Language, Truth and Logic, ch.6
- ^ C. L. Stevenson. Ethics and Language (1944), (Yale: Yale UP, 1960)
- ^ John Mackie. Ethics: Inventing Right and Wrong (1977), (Penguin, 1990)
- ^ Simon Blackburn. Ruling Passions: A Theory of Practical Reasoning, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1998)
- ^ Wise Choices, Apt Feelings: A Theory of Normative Judgment, (Harvard: Harvard UP, 1990)
- ^ "Compatibilism". Stanford Encyclopedia. http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/#3.
- ^ Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 148
- ^ Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 149
- ^ a b Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 159
- ^ Hume, D. An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, p. 161
- ^ See, e.g., R. E. Hobart, ‘Free Will as Involving Determination and Inconceivable Without It', Mind 43 (1934), pp. 1–27
- ^ First published in 1962 and reprinted in Gary Watson, ed., Free Will (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1982), pp. 59–80; second edition 2003
- ^ Hume, D (1748), 'Of miracles‘, in An Enquiry concerning human understanding, LA Selby-Bigge (ed.), 2nd edn, Oxford University Press, (1902), Section X, pp. 116–122
- ^ Hume, D (1748) "An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding." in Modern Philosophy: An Anthology of Primary Sources (R. Ariew, E. Watkins), Hackett 1998
- ^ Mackie, J. L. The Miracle of Theism (Oxford: Oxford: University Press, 1982), 29
- ^ Buckle, Stephen, Hume's Enlightenment Tract: The Unity and Purpose of An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), 269–74
- ^ Laurence L. Bongie. "David Hume: Prophet of the Counter-revolution (1965)". The Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=673&chapter=159422&layout=html&Itemid=27. Retrieved 18 September 2010.
- ^ David Hume. "LETTER LXXXIV.: The Bath Waters injurious: Complaints of Injustice: Hume's Autobiography: Dialogues on Natural Religion. – David Hume, Letters of David Hume to William Strahan (1756)". Note 13. The Online Library of Liberty. http://oll.libertyfund.org/?option=com_staticxt&staticfile=show.php%3Ftitle=652&chapter=62199&layout=html&Itemid=27#lf1223_footnote_nt841. Retrieved 18 September 2010.
- ^ Hume, D. (1740). A Treatise of Human Nature (1817 edition, p. 286)
- ^ Quoted in Mossner, EC., The life of David Hume, 1954, reprinted 2001, OUP, p. 311.
- ^ Neil McArthur, David Hume's political theory. University of Toronto, 2007, pp.70 & 124.
- ^ Adair, Douglass (1957) “‘That Politics Can be Reduced to a Science’: David Hume, James Madison, and the Tenth Federalist.” Huntington Library Quarterly 20: 343-360
- ^ Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the Eighteenth Century, 2 vols. (London: Smith, Elder and Co., 1876), vol. 2, 185
- ^ "Ida of a perfect Commonwealth". Library of Economics and Liberty. http://www.econlib.org/LIBRARY/LFBooks/Hume/hmMPL39.html. Retrieved 18 September 2010.
- ^ History of Political Philosophy, edited by Leo Strauss and Joseph Grospey, The University of Chicago Press, 1987, pp. 552 - 553, 556
- ^ Robbins, Lionel A History of Economic Thought: The LSE Lectures edited by Medema and Samuels. Ch 11 and 12
- ^ Hume, David An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals (1751)
- ^ Hume vol 6. p 531 cited in John Philipps Kenyon (1984). The history men: the historical profession in England since the Renaissance. U. of Pittsburgh Press. p. 42. http://books.google.com/books?id=1LkbAAAAIAAJ.
- ^ S. K. Wertz, "Hume, History, and Human Nature," Journal of the History of Ideas (1975) 36#3 pp. 481-496 in JSTOR
- ^ S. K. Wertz, "Hume and the Historiography of Science," Journal of the History of Ideas (1993) 54#3 pp. 411-436 in JSTOR
- ^ For this see the introduction by J. M. Keynes and P. Sraffa in: Hume, David (1965). An abstract of A treatise of Human Nature 1740. Connecticut: Archon Books
- ^ William Crouch. "Which character is Hume in the "Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion". http://www.onphilosophy.co.uk/natural_religion.html.
- ^ Prolegomena to Any Future Metaphysics, Kant, 'Preface'
- ^ The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 2, Ch. 46
- ^ A. J. Ayer (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London
- ^ in a letter of 14 December 1915, to Moritz Schlick (Papers, A, Vol. 8A, Doc.165)
- ^ Phillipson, N. (1989). Hume, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London
- ^ Norton, D. F. (ed.) (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–116
- ^ Karl Popper: Unended Quest; An Intellectual Autobiography, 1976, ISBN 0-415-28590-9
- ^ Karl Popper: The Logic of Scientific Discovery, 1934 (as Logik der Forschung, English translation 1959), ISBN 0-415-27844-9
References[link]
- Anderson, R. F. (1966). Hume's First Principles, University of Nebraska Press, Lincoln.
- Ayer, A. J. (1936). Language, Truth and Logic. London.
- Bongie, L. L. (1998) David Hume — Prophet of the Counter-Revolution. Liberty Fund, Indianapolis,
- Broackes, Justin (1995). Hume, David, in Ted Honderich (ed.) The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, New York, Oxford University Press,
- Daiches D., Jones P., Jones J. (eds )The Scottish Enlightenment: 1730–1790 A Hotbed of Genius The University of Edinburgh, 1986. In paperback, The Saltire Society, 1996 ISBN 0-85411-069-0
- Einstein, A. (1915) Letter to Moritz Schlick, Schwarzschild, B. (trans. & ed.) in The Collected Papers of Albert Einstein, vol. 8A, R. Schulmann, A. J. Fox, J. Illy, (eds.) Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ (1998), p. 220.
- Flew, A. (1986). David Hume: Philosopher of Moral Science, Basil Blackwell, Oxford.
- Fogelin, R. J. (1993). Hume's scepticism. In Norton, D. F. (ed.) (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge University Press, pp. 90–116.
- Garfield, Jay L. (1995) The Fundamental Wisdom of the Middle Way Oxford University Press
- Giles, J. (1993). "The No-Self Theory: Hume, Buddhism, and Personal Identity". Philosophy East and West 43 (2): 175–200.
- Giles, J. (1997) No Self to be Found: The Search for Personal Identity University Press of America.
- Graham, R. (2004). The Great Infidel — A Life of David Hume. John Donald, Edinburgh.
- Harwood, Sterling (1996). "Moral Sensibility Theories", in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Supplement) (New York: Macmillan Publishing Co.).
- Hume, D. (EHU) (1777). An Enquiry concerning Human Understanding. Nidditch, P. N. (ed.), 3rd. ed. (1975), Clarendon Press, Oxford.
- Hume, D. (1751). An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals. David Hume, Essays Moral, Political, and Literary edited with preliminary dissertations and notes by T.H. Green and T.H. Grose, 1:1–8. London: Longmans, Green 1907.
- Hume, D. (1740). A Treatise of Human Nature (1967, edition). Oxford University Press, Oxford.
- Hume, D. (1752–1758). Political Discourses
- Bilingual English-French (translated by Fabien Grandjean). Mauvezin, France, Trans-Europ-Repress, 1993, 22 cm, V-260 p. Bibliographic notes, index.
- Husserl, E. (1970). The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, Carr, D. (trans.), Northwestern University Press, Evanston.
- Kolakowski, L. (1968). The Alienation of Reason: A History of Positivist Thought, Doubleday, Garden City.
- Morris, William Edward, David Hume, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Spring 2001 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.)
- Mossner, Ernest Campbell (April 1950). "Philosophy and Biography: The Case of David Hume". The Philosophical Review 59 (2): 184–201. DOI:10.2307/2181501. JSTOR 2181501.
- Norton, D. F. (1993). Introduction to Hume's thought. In Norton, D. F. (ed.), (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge University Press, pp. 1–32.
- O'Connor, D. (2001). Routledge philosophy guidebook to Hume and religion, Routledge, London.
- Penelhum, T. (1993). Hume's moral philosophy. In Norton, D. F. (ed.), (1993). The Cambridge Companion to Hume, Cambridge University Press, pp. 117–147.
- Phillipson, N. (1989). Hume, Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London.
- Popkin, Richard H. (1993) "Sources of Knowledge of Sextus Empiricus in Hume's Time" Journal of the History of Ideas, Vol. 54, No. 1. (Jan., 1993), pp. 137–141.
- Popkin, R. & Stroll, A. (1993) Philosophy. Reed Educational and Professional Publishing Ltd, Oxford.
- Popper. K. (1960). Knowledge without authority. In Miller D. (ed.), (1983). Popper, Oxford, Fontana, pp. 46–57.
- Robinson, Dave & Groves, Judy (2003). Introducing Political Philosophy. Icon Books. ISBN 1-84046-450-X.
- Russell, B. (1946). A History of Western Philosophy. London, Allen and Unwin.
- Robbins, Lionel (1998). A History of Economic Thought: The LSE Lectures. Edited by Steven G. Medema and Warren J. Samuels. Princeton University Press, Princeton, NJ.
- Spiegel, Henry William,(1991). The Growth of Economic Thought, 3rd Ed., Durham: Duke University Press.
- Stroud, B. (1977). Hume, Routledge, London & New York.
- Taylor, A. E. (1927). David Hume and the Miraculous, Leslie Stephen Lecture. Cambridge, pp. 53–4.
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| Persondata | |
|---|---|
| Name | Hume, David |
| Alternative names | |
| Short description | Scottish philosopher, economist and historian |
| Date of birth | (1711-04-26)26 April 1711 |
| Place of birth | Edinburgh, Scotland |
| Date of death | 25 August 1776(1776-08-25) |
| Place of death | Edinburgh, Scotland |
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http://es.wn.com/David Hume
http://ru.wn.com/Юм, Дэвид
http://pl.wn.com/David Hume
http://fr.wn.com/David Hume
http://de.wn.com/David Hume
http://hi.wn.com/डेविड ह्यूम
http://pt.wn.com/David Hume
http://nl.wn.com/David Hume
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This article is licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License, which means that you can copy and modify it as long as the entire work (including additions) remains under this license.
